


what you were then, i am today

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [129]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky's total failure to recognize his own massive psychological progress, C-PTSD, Disabled Character, M/M, Mentally Ill Character, Natasha's Psychological Expertise, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve has managed to get pretty perceptive, Triggers, recovery is a spiral, sometimes even the kitten can't help, stealth triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 21:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15495321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: One of the least comfortable lessons is always the same: sometimes, there's nothing you can do. Sometimes, you just don't get to be in control.Not all the time. There is some stuff you can always do, some stuff you have to do or life's like being punched in the face from all sides all the time. You have to do what you can, which just sometimes makes the part where despite everything youdoyou still end up face-down in the gravelreally God-damn obnoxious.But that's just basically how life works.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it. 
> 
> The lack of accepting anything post TWS as canon includes backstory-elements established in later films, which is to say no _Thor: Ragnarok_ isn't relevant/applicable to this verse either, even in what it establishes about the history of Asgard (as such and in detail).
> 
> Also note that you reaaaaally shouldn't read _characters'_ opinions on fictional franchises (or, well, anything) as necessarily reflective of the _author's_. They exist very separately.
> 
> And finally I suppose the end of this first chapter contains a spoiler for an episode of _Leverage_.

One of the least comfortable lessons is always the same: sometimes, there's nothing you can do. Sometimes, you just don't get to be in control. 

Not all the time. There is some stuff you can always do, some stuff you have to do or life's like being punched in the face from all sides all the time. You have to do what you can, which just sometimes makes the part where despite everything you _do_ you still end up face-down in the gravel _really God-damn obnoxious_. 

But that's just basically how life works. 

 

Steve mostly tries to focus on what he can do. 

Like he can eventually argue, convincingly - and for _both_ their sakes, not even just Bucky's - that TV news is nobody's friend. It just does not happen at home, and on the rare occasions they're in a restaurant or somewhere else that it's on already, he'll just straight up ask for it to get turned off. And honestly he kind of feels like he's doing the whole restaurant a favour. 

Because with a TV news show it's way, way too easy to suddenly get blindsided by footage neither of them needs, vivid enough to have both of their limbic systems reacting before they've even really got through realizing what they're seeing. And yeah, Bucky's ends up in worse places, but Steve doesn't need that either. Not really. 

So no video news stuff - streaming or TV or whatever - because it's way easier to back out of a bunch of text before you end up in a bad place. It's even easier to back out of just audio, and a lot of days Steve's a bit wary of audio-broadcast. He'd rather go for text. 

Besides, Steve's pretty sure the worst bad habits of modern news-coverage habits is reserved for the damn TV versions. So not only is it a matter of stuff inherent to the medium, he's pretty sure _that's mostly where the garbage goes_ , where there's not that much that's of any actual value beyond wanting people upset - and glued to their screens, to the news company's product - anyway. 

It's not like garbage is new, in the news. It's always been there. Used to be you had to pick your newspaper based on whether or not you were going to get a bunch of screaming headlines or something that was actually useful to read. And there's still a bit of that but not as much: now as far as he can tell if it's in a video format, it's just designed to make whoever sees it panic as much as possible. 

He makes the mistake of mentioning this to Tony, and gets an amused look and Tony saying, "You want a cane to shake about this? I can get you one. Right colour scheme, even." And Steve still doesn't punch him. Somehow. 

On the other hand after about twenty minutes of arguing Tony admits he's not wrong. "In text, the crazy shit just moved to the tabloids," he says, "but yeah on TV they still try to pretend it's news. It doesn't help that most of the major companies are run by sociopaths who profit off everyone else's terror." 

And then they talk about that for a while. It maybe still ends up with what Elizabeth refers to as "agreeing combatively with each other" - although she usually looks kind of fond when she says it, so Steve figures that's . . . a plus? - but at least it's not an argument. 

Steve figures you have to know it's pretty bad when Tony can't help agreeing with Steve about it even when he's in a contrary mood, so that's at least - what's the word. Validating. 

So that's one thing: no TV news. Careful with radio or podcast or whatever news. 

And Steve gets pretty good at scanning through summaries and then going to find the spoilers he needs to know about, for any kind of fiction. That one's a bit funny, too, because sometimes that means he finds out he shouldn't watch it, or Bucky shouldn't watch it, or something, but sometimes it turns out that it _would_ 've been a bad idea if they _had_ watched it or read it or listened to it without knowing, but because they know in advance, it's not a problem.

There's a Netflix show called _Sense8_ that's like that. You'd _think_ it would've been filled with so much stuff that's a bad idea that it should've been a no-brainer but oddly, knowing about it in advance, it's not bad. The opposite, really - like it's not something either of them should pick up on a bad day, but on an okay day, a lot of it's kind of soothing, even the stuff you'd think would be bad. 

Maybe because even though just about all of the main cast are a big damn mess, they're all trying really hard, and they all have each other's backs, and frankly for Steve it reminds him a lot of - well. His own life. Their lives. 

So he gets pretty good at gauging that. 

_And_ he makes himself suck it up and learn his lesson about listening to Natasha about the ones where you'd think from a quick scan that it'll be fine but turn out to have hidden razorblades. 

Bucky's not bad at it either, though sometimes he figures it out and then watches or listens or reads on _purpose_ , because of that whole seeking-negative-stimulus thing. 

But then at least he's aware he's doing it, and often that weird effect where it's okay because you know still comes into play. That's how they figured out _Sense8_ was fine, after all. 

It's when it comes out of left field that things get . . . difficult. 

The problem is there is literally no way to avoid _everything_ that can come out of left field. So there's always something ready to hit you in the face - because you make a mistake, or because you couldn't've predicted it to start with. 

_Saving Private Ryan_ , for example. 

 

They watched _Band of Brothers_ with Sam, Maria, Clint and Tasha, because Sam insisted. Steve'd been wary, but Sam'd been right - it was good. 

The show'd been good, but so'd been getting to watch it like that. They'd used Bucky's theatre at the Tower because why wouldn't you? But it'd still felt like a normal thing, as long as you were thinking the kind of "normal" that happens here in the future (as Steve sometimes still thinks of it, when part of him remembers what used to be normal and gets thrown again) that involves having a huge high-definition screen to watch digital copies of high quality TV shows and movies on. 

And it had honestly been nice to have Maria there, and relaxed, and not doing anything for work, and Sam's right: somewhere out there, there better be some Army general who's at least slightly aware of how stupid they were and how they messed up and lost one of the best officers they could've had. 

There's beer, and popcorn, and Thai and Indian food, and nothing manages to mess up Bucky's head for the whole two nights they spend watching, and it's good. 

And so is the show. 

Apparently someone'd tried to do the same sort of thing for the Howling Commandos, but SHIELD'd blocked them by refusing to declassify anything new, and the old stuff being in a hundred different films and books already made it kind of a non-starter because people'd just kind of treat it like the same-old-same-old. 

There'd been a couple lawsuits, one a joint effort by some production company and some freedom-of-information advocates arguing that SHIELD was blatantly abusing and ignoring the laws around what gets declassified when, but they ran into the mire of SHIELD's own legal teams and spun out. 

Between the way the guys were apparently famously tight-lipped about anything that wasn't in the official record, SHIELD doing that, and some other factors Steve's not sure he completely understands about writer's contracts, a major strike, and some other stuff, the idea just foundered on the rocks of "too much work, not enough reward". What Clint refers to as "dying in production Hell." 

Steve's honestly kind of grateful for that. 

On the other hand it's . . . actually nice, in a weird, uncomfortably nostalgic way, to watch something done pretty damn well about the War that _isn't_ about him, or much to do with HYDRA at all, and also isn't Hollywood's . . . really baseless ideas about anything. 

As Steve notes to Sam, the closest they ever came to interacting with Easy Company was commandeering two of their jeeps at one point, by which he really means stealing them, because of a need to get somewhere else in a hurry. It's, well. Kind of nice. The only time Captain America or the Howling Commandos even get mentioned is off-hand, the same way there's a bit with the Canadian Engineers and a bit about rescuing the remains of a British Airborne squad. And the fact that the off-hand mention is in fact Dick Winters getting kinda pissed off that Steve stole his jeeps is _completely fair_. 

Steve kind of wishes the guy hadn't died in 2009, so he could write him an apology letter. He'd known at the time he had to be giving someone a _really_ bad day by doing it. There just hadn't been any other options. Like so much of the whole damn War. 

Even the parts that you'd think would be painful to watch aren't - the only bit Steve almost has to turn off or fast-forward is the bit in the one where there's the really God damned awful lieutenant, the one who shouldn't've ever been let in the damn Army let alone given rank and command, and at just about the point it's winding him up too much to watch he gets replaced by someone who can tell one end of combat from his own ass so it works out. 

It helps that Maria sympathises, at length and out loud, about the whole stretch with Dyk. And relaxes the same as Steve does. But also says, of that replacement lieutenant, "I still would've already got rid of him", which Steve also agrees with because not only is executing a large group of unarmed prisoners murder, and wrong (and that would be enough) it's also _really God-damned stupid_ because every story of prisoner murder that gets out is another reason for the enemy _not_ to surrender and another round of probably more of your _own men_ getting killed because someone decides he might as well go out in a hail of bullets instead of just throwing his gun down and giving up. 

Steve catches more than a couple of slightly satisfied looks on Sam's face as Steve and Maria have that conversation and he kind of suspects Sam has just . . . managed, or arranged, something that's been bugging him for a while, but on the other hand Steve decides that's fully in the realm of "I psychoanalyze my own life plenty I don't need to follow every thread of this bit" and ignores it. 

Watching through makes him a bit wistful, sometimes, maybe a bit - no, sad isn't the word. Maybe "sorrowful" is the word. It's a more poetic, frilly word but it's almost a poetic, frilly feeling. And it comes along with a lot of stuff that's almost soothing, enough that Steve says, after the third episode, " . . . it's probably not a good sign that watching this is kind of comforting, is it." 

"I wasn't gonna say anything," Bucky replies, blandly. 

"Nah, you're good," Sam'd said, as he got up to get another beer out of the fridge and a cider for Natasha. "See," he continues, raising his voice from the kitchen so it'll carry, "it's just _comforting_ , right? If you were getting hit by chest-aching nostalgia and homesickness - like I'm pretty sure you would've, when we first met - then I'd be worried." 

Steve opens his mouth to answer that, and can't think of any answer that's actually a good idea, and decides to drink some of his coffee instead while Clint and Maria don't even pretend they're not laughing. 

Steve does wonder for a minute or two if he should be worried that Bucky might still be just that, if he should be worried this is a possibility - 

\- and then realizes that may be the stupidest thing he's thought this week. And in fact the second he pays attention, with that in mind, it gets really obvious that although Bucky's enjoying watching, it's the kind of enjoyment that comes with the rider _thank God I never have to do that again._

Although he's not sure if Bucky'd be actually thanking God. Although he might be. It's hard to tell with Bucky, sometimes. 

Overall, though, it's a pretty good two days of hanging out and watching. 

Later, Steve realizes that he should've _probably_ read something into the part where nobody else _did_ mention _Saving Private Ryan_. Like, nobody. Despite it coming from the same people. That in and of itself should've been a clue. 

Sam winces and apologizes later, saying he forgot to mention, but Steve waves it off because of exactly that. And he should've damn well checked out the plot-line himself and _not_ trusted to it being from the same creative team, seeing as - for example - Joss Whedon'd made both _firefly_ , which had been okay, and _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ which had irritated the absolute Hell out of Steve and made Bucky almost as mad as _Mockingjay_ , and that had just been the first season. 

So he should not have just assumed that Spielberg and Hanks being involved would automatically make their other project okay, and that's definitely on him. But he does find out they made it, and he's not smart enough to check up much. 

And at the time he remembered seeing mention of the opening, of how it was ground-breaking and important for showing a battlefield for what it actually damn-well looked like, intestines and blood-spatter and occasional horrific absurdities like a guy picking up his own blown-off arm and walking off with it included. And that was actually good - what tends to bug Steve are the other ones, the ones that sanitize things, the ones that tell lies. 

So he's an idiot, and they watch it. Most of it. 

Bucky turns it off a solid chunk before the end, though, over Steve's half-hearted objections, on the basis (Bucky says) that Steve is way, way too pissed off by the whole thing and it's not worth it. He claims he can hear the squeak of Steve's teeth grinding, and Steve thinks that's probably an exaggeration but on the other hand he wouldn't be willing to bet on it. 

Steve doesn't sleep well that night, but it's not a restless not-sleeping-well. It's the one where he lies there and glares at the ceiling and writes angry letters or has arguments in his head for hours when he should be making his mind shut up and let him rest. 

And later on he'll realize it's probably a pretty good sign that Bucky managed to get at least a couple hours sleep (as many as he'd've gotten anyway) _in spite_ of Steve lying there half-dozing and being a ball of outraged resentful anger at the stupid movie and its stupid script and its stupid lack of God-damn understanding how anything, ever, actually worked. That's probably progress. But at the time he's still too damn angry about it. 

Steve's still pretty angry about it, really, when he meets Elizabeth, Jane and Thor for lunch the next day. 

He hasn't bothered ranting to Bucky about it because, well, that seems even _more_ pointless than preaching at the choir, because at least the choir might actually like the sermon. With Bucky it's not like Steve's telling him anything new about the stupid callousness of the REMFs or the cold algebra of war in general or how when you put the two together you get things that are incredibly ugly, and when you add _that_ to the stuff that already exists and already makes humans dehumanize one another it gets uglier than that, and also just - 

It's not like Bucky doesn't know all of that better than he does. 

But far as metaphors go on this one he figures Elizabeth - whose immediate, unstudied response when Steve apologizes for being snippy about something and brings up having watched the film is, "Oh _God_ I hate that movie!" - probably counts as the choir. So that probably counts as preaching to the choir, but that's okay, since she seems to be perfectly happy with it. 

Especially since she pitches in helping Steve explain to Jane and Thor why the film is terrible and the script-writer should be ashamed of themselves. 

"I'm not gonna say it couldn't've happened," Steve explains, mostly to Jane and a bit to Thor, with Elizabeth nodding. "I'm just saying _I_ wrote damn condolence letters to a family that covered all their kids _at once_ and I didn't even have formal command of more than my guys, and nobody higher up from me gave much of a damn about saying anything other than 'war is Hell' so the only way it could've happened is if that family's so well-connected with some senator or general that they've decided the fact that _she's_ sad is more important than the _exact same thing_ happening to hundreds of other damn women and kids and families all over the country." 

"My grandfather had to write one for a family that lost four sons and three grandsons in one naval battle," Elizabeth says, nodding. "I mean it was his story of his worst day ever, but it wasn't . . . special. If your whole family's in the military and you're in that war even if someone's thought it through and made sure you're in different regiments there's still a good chance everyone could get killed on the same day. And as for the mail or other communications holding up so she gets the notifications all at once - " 

"Yeah I love the idea that mail was reliable," Steve says, acidly, because he doesn't. "Again, assuming you're not a damn Senator. Basically," he says, "nothing worked like that. And the only way it can get even close is the worst kind of . . . " 

"Classist bullshit," Elizabeth says, her swearing precise in the way it's always precise, and Steve finds kind of endearing. "It's not this nebulous sense of a vague implication that this kid is worth more than anyone else on the field because of human grief, it's straight up saying: the human grief of this kid's family is worth more than anyone else in the US Army, because we care that this happened to this kid's mom and not anybody else." 

That whole conversation is actually pretty helpful, especially once Thor seems to figure that Steve's done venting and ends up asking some - pretty insightful, actually - questions about why he figures they came up with the script in the first place, how someone could misunderstand that badly, and all the rest. 

That conversation swings around to talk about _Black Hawk Down_ and Somalia and the strange obsession with bringing dead bodies back and where that came from. Steve had found that absolutely _baffling_ when he'd watched that film, so much so that he had to look it up because he couldn't imagine a world wherein a _corpse_ was important enough to even think about risking someone else's life for. But it turned out to be a thing that happened. 

It almost gave him a headache. A literal headache. 

Thor actually has some smart things to say about it, mostly - he says - because he sees some echoes in Asgard's stuff, and he figures it's for similar reasons. 

"When you get to be that much more powerful," he says, slowly, "than the people you actually _fight_ , and your casualties start being so much lower, I think you . . . lose track of some sense of proportion. Of what it all amounts to. Because you're not really fighting anyone who can match you anymore, because nobody - yourself included, but also your potential opponents - wants to deal with how it will end. But then you start to think of war as something where one or two casualties on your side is a catastrophe, regardless of what's inflicted on the other." 

Steve figures that sounds pretty plausible. 

Overall, Steve goes home in a better temper than he left, and he can at least put the whole thing aside as not worth thinking about, seeing as how the movie's just about twenty years old now anyway. It still makes him angry, and probably always will. But he can stop thinking about it. Mostly. 

 

Another time there was that one _Leverage_ episode. That one, too. That one was fun, in a not-fun-at-all kind of way. 

 

The show's one Elizabeth got them onto, one of the ones Steve and Bucky watch together on purpose rather than either just happening to watch most episodes together because one of them's following it and the other's around, or - like _Game of Thrones_ \- shows where one of them deliberately _avoids_ most of the episodes. 

Or even like most of the Korean soaps where frankly Steve can't keep track of the multiple braided plotlines even when he does try paying attention from the beginning. 

He's no better with the telenovelas, even though he's better at Spanish. 

And frankly the reasons Bucky watches them are really ninety degrees at least from the reasons most other people do. For Bucky Steve suspects the part where you can completely lose track of what on earth is going on if you blink at the wrong moment is part of the _point_ , instead of being a drawback. He thinks that's a lot of how _reality_ ends up feeling for Bucky, a lot of the time - when you add in the part where for all he's fluent in like half a dozen languages and conversant in six more, there's still a step or so of removal for anything but English and Russian, then it's like he can just watch the incoherent stuff go on and be amused by the interactions without having to worry about what he's missing. 

Unlike real life. 

So that's a feature, not a bug. That'd be Tony's way of putting it. 

Neither of them loves _Leverage_ quite as much as Elizabeth does, but the charm and the cheerfulness of it, and the way that the stories always come around to some kind of schadenfreudic happy ending and victory for the team manages to make up for how hard it can be to suspend disbelief. So it's nice and it's not stressful and it fills time sometimes. 

They've both sort of classed any of the hand-to-hand stuff that the hitter character does in the same box as the fight choreography on all of the pre-2000 Star Trek franchises. The box where you just have to pretend what's happening on screen . . . isn't, and rewrite it in your own head with something that isn't quite so . . . stupid. But they can do that. 

There's an almost cartoony quality to the whole thing that makes it restful. 

It has the downsides that almost all TV shows have: there's always going to be at least a scene or two in a hospital once or twice a season, for example. At this point it's so easy to predict those moments, they're so obvious in the rhythm of television and movies, that Bucky's just about automatically going for a drink of water or some other plausible distraction a few milliseconds before the medical facility flickers onto the screen. Steve just knows when not to bother pausing. 

Or, if it's a better day, sometimes Bucky can get by just looking at Something Else. The tablet, the kitten, closing his eyes - anything works. As negative stimuli go, visual representations of that stuff has more or less downgraded to where Steve estimates most arachnophobes are with seeing a spider, at least when there's someone else around to make it go away and not be a problem anymore. 

Not fun, not something they go looking for, kinda awful it gets sprung on them, but not going to unsettle the whole day, especially not if Bucky sees it coming. 

So that's mostly got worked out. So they both figure it's fine. 

And then the damn show goes and puts Hardison in a coffin and buries him. 

It's literal - no metaphor for death, it's just actually having the bad guys use that as their hostage set-up, and showing it on the screen. Without warning. And Steve didn't know, before-hand, that was going to be a problem but apparently it is. 

Really, really is. 

It's like the time the power went out, except that time Bucky'd just been sitting beside him. This time Bucky's comfortably (until just now) sprawled out to lean against Steve's chest and Steve can feel the abrupt stillness of everything - breath, movement, he'd almost swear _pulse_ \- in every part of Bucky's body that's against his. And it's - 

It's not good. It's _never_ good. 

Steve turns the TV off. He actually doesn't know if that makes the little TV-box thing Tony's given him to replace the old Apple TV stop running but he also doesn't care: turning the TV off makes the whole thing go away, right now. 

"Bucky?" he says, quietly, and it is not comforting when Bucky doesn't actually respond right away. That means this is in fact worse than the power going out. 

He considers trying to make a gentle, careful joke about breathing and how it would be nice if Bucky would do some, or at least some a little deeper than whatever he's doing now. But then the cat's standing up out of her curl on Bucky's stomach and jumping up onto the back of the futon with a plaintive noise and Steve decides that's probably just going to be a waste of time. 

If she's that unhappy it means this is . . . more than a joke is going to help right now. 

"Hey," he says, instead, and puts one hand on Bucky's left shoulder. "Sit up for a sec?" 

It's not clear whether Bucky's responding to the request or to the careful pressure on his shoulder, but he does sit up. But it's the kind of sitting up where he stops still as soon as his other leg swings down to put his feet on the floor, gaze dropped and head bowed and the heels of his hands resting on the edge of the futon where reflex put them for balance. Like he could grasp that Steve wants him to sit up, but there's nothing to keep him going from there. 

Abrikoska's settled down into a crouch and makes a really sad and pathetic noise. 

Once Steve stops moving Bucky, stops applying the pressure, he stops moving. 

It's not catatonia. Not . . .quite. You could forgive someone for making the mistake of thinking it is and it doesn't even look that different from the times Steve's seen where it _is_ , more or less, but now that Bucky's sitting up Steve can see the short, sharp, almost-not-there breaths and how they move Bucky's ribs and that's something else. 

It probably has a name. Steve honestly doesn't care and doesn't even want to know. Finishes sitting up himself and folds his closer leg out of the way so he can rest his right hand on Bucky's left shoulder again. 

"Buck," he says, still soft, "hey - can you look at me?" 

The thing is, every situation's different. 

If he'd come home or walked into a room to find Bucky like this, Steve'd just sit somewhere obvious and close and wait until Bucky looked at him, got sure enough of the room or confused enough that things weren't following the expected mental script to _look_ at Steve to see what the Hell's going on. And he definitely wouldn't touch Bucky until after that - it wouldn't . . . 

It'd be the opposite of a good idea. 

But this is different, right now is different - physical contact already _there_ , so that sitting there without touching would mean something different. Communicate something different. And that something-different would almost certainly come with an edge that implies Steve's mad, or upset, or waiting for Bucky to do something and _that_ always translates to it being wrong, bad, if Bucky isn't. Doesn't do whatever it is. 

And that's not where he wants this to go. At all. 

So here and now, Steve follows up the question after a second or two by very, very carefully reaching over to touch the far side of Bucky's face, to guide Bucky to turn and look at him. 

Bucky's pupils are blown, and Steve'd put down good money that his pulse's dropped right down into the disturbing slowness that comes with dissociation. It takes a second of Bucky looking at him before something seems to focus, and before Bucky takes in what has to be the first halfway real breath he's taken in over a minute. 

It's not a steady breath, and neither are the ones that come after, but it's at least a full one. And on the exhale Bucky's body loses some of the weird, unnatural suspended stillness, and twists up into tension instead. 

As a final sign, the ridiculous cat bleats a complaint and jumps down onto the seat of the futon to bash her head against Bucky's leg. 

 

What Steve pieces together, from just-enough-words and thoughts he wishes he could avoid having, is that one good way to make someone who's really hard to kill really fucking sorry for whatever they just did or didn't do is this: stick them in a heavy-duty metal box, the size of a too-small coffin, and lock it. 

And it's versatile, because if you shut it tight enough, it's air-tight enough on its own to suffocate, but not so water-tight that if you dump it in a tank, or even a fucking river, the water doesn't seep in and fill it up. 

Or you could drive just enough of a wedge into the seal that it counted as enough air, especially for someone like Bucky or Steve, but not so much that anyone's instincts would actually believe it, and just . . . leave the person there, in the dark, for . . . a while. 

As long as you wanted to. Especially if you did pour in some water after a while. 

Steve figures they . . . could've done without that getting brought back up. Honestly. But he's not even sure that if he'd looked up the episode summary and read it out Bucky would've _known_ , and neither is Bucky, because _that_ happens too. That things aren't a problem until they suddenly are. 

So that kind of out-of-the-blue is something you can't plan for either. 

 

And then there's the ones that slide in and unfold and you don't even realize something in your head is getting twisted up until an hour afterwards, when it's way, way too God-damned late, which is how _Spirited Away_ hits them both.


	2. Chapter 2

It's the kind of week where everyone feels off. 

A few months ago, after a lot of alcohol, Natalia had a very long conversation with Thor about the galaxy, its structure, the power blocs as he understood them, what was going on, and finally why - if all of these things existed the way they did - Earth, Terra, Midgard, why they'd been left _alone_ so much. 

_Most places aren't_ , Thor had said, pretty bluntly. _Part of the reason the Nine Realms exist as they do, that Asgard exists as it does, is because we mostly . . . don't ask anything of the Realms. The worlds. Vanaheim is a beautiful place - they're pastoralists. They use exactly as much of our craft, magic, technology, whatever you want to call it, to make their lives as pastoralists the way they want them, exactly as much of our knowledge to manage the ecology of their world, and when we called they would send warriors, and otherwise they live as they like. Alfheim and Nithavellir are both ruins - the Dark Elves wiped out their cousins first, when Malekith rose first, and then his war with my grandfather destroyed his own world. There are some colonists on Alfheim from Asgard and Muspelheim and Vanaheim, but there are a lot of monsters._

He'd sort of paused and added, _By which I mostly mean very big wildlife. Like, very big._

Natalia'd given him a sour look and said, _Like that goddamn ice-giant thing that ended up here?_ and Thor had winced and looked sheepish. 

_I am sorry about that,_ he said. 

_But even you guys stopped coming here,_ Natalia pointed out, and Thor had nodded, solemnly. 

_My father declared Midgard off-limits,_ he says. _He never explained why, though most assume it was because he put the Eye here, the Tesseract. I do not think that would be enough, though. And although the story in Asgard is that the Jotun started our war with them just because they wanted conquest and dominion I don't think that is true anymore._

Because she'd been very drunk Natalia had given him an equally solemn look and said, _I'm very proud of your continuing political awakening, Thor,_ and he'd laughed. Wryly. 

_There are a great many things I would like to ask my father,_ Thor said, and he'd taken another drink of the brandy he'd been drinking to match Natalia's beer. _But the problem is, now?_

_You couldn't trust anything he told you?_ Natalia had filled in for him and he'd nodded, slowly. 

_And if my mother were alive I could ask her, but I am not sure I could trust her answers either_ , he'd said, sadly. _I am not sure where to go from there. It is not something I'm very used to feeling - and you're probably laughing at me and it's probably deserved,_ he'd added, ruefully, giving her a sidelong look. 

Natalia'd shaken her head. _I'm not laughing,_ she'd said, and she'd meant it. _I'm sorry you're having to learn this shit - to tell you the truth part of me keeps fucking wishing for a world where at least someone could just fucking stay innocent without them and everyone else paying such a fucking high price for it._

Thor'd looked like he was going to say something, and then changed his mind, and Natalia wondered what his first thought had been; the second one, the one he said aloud, turned out to be, _The thing I think is worse is not even that I cannot trust what they would tell me. I think part of me always knew that I might be deceived. But I think the trouble is now that I can no longer trust their wisdom in hiding things, or their wisdom in the choices they make about things that I do not know or understand. Once if I found that my father lied to me I would have been angry and hurt, but I would have trusted in the end that he did it for the best, and that he knew what the best was. Now?_ He'd shaken his head. 

_That_ , Natalia had said, with more feeling than she'd normally put in it and yet choosing to put exactly that much in, _is the worst feeling in the whole fucking world_. And she'd meant it. 

Thor'd given her a long look, and then a nod that seemed even to Natalia to indicate he understood what she'd just said. Especially since afterwards he raised his brandy bottle and she'd clinked it with her beer bottle. 

Then she'd asked, _Do you have any suspicions why he'd make us off-limits?_

_Nothing concrete,_ Thor admitted. _Other than whatever the reason, it must've been also why the Jotun attacked here first - they occupied Niflheim as a launching position, but Niflheim is empty except for ice and has been since before any history I saw ever recorded. Then they came here. But there is no advantage to the conquest of Midgard that I ever heard, so it makes no sense. But it is also -_

Thor had frowned and stopped. _It was something I never understood about that war,_ he admitted. _Because Midgard was also a poor place for us to choose to meet the Jotun. It would honestly have made more tactical sense to let them take Midgard and use that time to shore up the other realms, and then either attack them here and drive them back out, or force them to try to break their own siege. When I was young I believed my father when he told me it was because of our responsibility to protect the people of Midgard, but I no longer believe in his altruism and we came very close to losing that war, and it cost us a great deal. Something about Midgard,_ he concluded, _was so important that the Jotun could not be allowed to get more than a foothold here. And I do not yet know what it is._

But there had been a note in his voice that made Natalia tilt her head to the side. _But you have suspicions?_ she'd pushed, and he'd sighed. 

_I have learned some things,_ he admits. _And for all I am the one most happy to extoll every virtue that my lady possess and they are many -_

And Natalia had laughed out loud because yes: if you got Thor started on the subject of Why Jane Foster Is Amazing, he could keep going, straight-faced, for a good two hours at least.

_\- the fact is,_ he went on, although he acknowledged her laugh with a flash of a smile, _mortals, beings with short lives and no . . .magic, I don't have a better word for it -_

Natalia'd waved that away. Whatever the hell it was Thor could do with lightning, whatever the fuck it was the Tesseract did, or the Staff Loki'd used, whatever Asgard's weird abilities to manipulate energy were, she was perfectly happy to call it _magic_ for now. 

_\- they cannot even touch things like the Aether without death - _quick_ death,_ he'd qualified, clarified. _Yes, it was killing her slowly but she should have been . . . vaporized, obliterated, the first time she touched it. But instead she carried it. And I do not understand everything about Bruce's work, or Betty's, or how Steve or James became the way they are, except that what I know, what is commonly understood of Midgardians, Terrans, and of races alike to Terrans is that it should not be possible. They should not have survived what they did, with the effects that they have. And they are not alone! I have seen . . . flashes of intuition, of understanding, of capabilities in Midgardians - in histories, through your news media, all over - that do not in the least square with what 'everyone knows'_ , and he'd made the scare quotes with the exaggeration of a drunk, _about you._

Natalia'd been unable not to say, _And have you read the shit we come up with to explain that stuff?_ because she knows Thor is pretty indiscriminate in the information he'll vacuum up, although he does seem to turn to at least reasonable people to figure out where to classify what he learns. 

_Hah - yes,_ he'd replied. _And I don't think any of them are right. But some of them I think might not be completely wrong._

 

There are a lot of days Natalia thinks about that conversation. Especially on the days when it kind of feels like everyone in her life is a little bit more attuned to one another than they should be, even when you take everything about them into account. It's a thought she's wary of: confirmation bias isn't just a thing she knows very well, it's a thing she's _used_ like the wonderful tool and help it is for what she's done her whole life, along with every other bias the human (and apparently Asgardian and most other sapient) mind can come up with. 

But it's still one she has. Most often when everyone seems a bit off at the same time. 

It's probably bullshit: well within statistical chaos and then maybe a little for the fact that they are starting to rely on one another, to look to one another as a kind of balance and check, and that means (as Natalia is well aware) if things start to wobble it can have a knock-on effect all down the line. 

The human mind likes to try to find patterns. 

 

Natalia wakes up around six in the morning to a text from Steve from around four suggesting that she not drop by the condo to meet him at 9, but meet him at the Starbucks nearby instead. That isn't a good sign. 

It's been several months since the last time he straight-up diverted this way. She's kept up her pattern, where she drops by on her own impolite fiat - she lets him know, rather than asking - because by now it's comfortable enough that the whole situation's skipped right over any implication that James has to be nice or play host, but it's also comfortable enough that it _has_ skipped over, and it hasn't been an issue. 

The text is also so flawlessly polite - full sentences, polite request, the whole deal - that instead of texting back _rough night?_ or a wry comment about things being that good, Natalia contemplates the screen for a few minutes and then just sends _gotcha, see you there :)_. 

Then she times her departure to get there at eight-thirty. 

The barista, Sheena, recognizes her. Actually the girl recognized her the first time she came in here, with James, but that time she recognized the Black Widow and managed pretty handily to keep her reaction locked down and invisible. This time, though, she's happy to show the more familiar, mundane recognition that comes with _hey you're somehow socially associated with some of my favourite regulars._

She seems like a nice girl. 

Once upon a time Natalia might have harboured the mild expectation that Steve would find something independent and unique to get attached enough to that he ended up a _regular_. She was actually quietly impressed that he thought through enough, at some point, to realize that with James it might be a better idea to rely on the consistency of chains and their head-office-dictated recipes. 

Though to be fair this is one of those Starbucks that works pretty hard to pretend it's at least something like a real neighbourhood cafe, and not just the coffee equivalent of a fast-food feeding chain. There's some basic thought to the layout of the tables and the little area with arm-chairs and an electric fire. 

Natalia gets one of the Clover coffees for the hell of it and settles at a table near the back of the place to wait. 

Steve shows up at around ten to nine, which also isn't a great sign. 

He's pretty well trained to formal politeness: for anything official he's either exactly on time or five minutes early, and for informal things he's anywhere from five minutes early to five minutes late. Too early, and you're imposing on the host or the staff as much as you're making sure you're on time, and he doesn't tend to do that. 

So if he shows up more than five minutes early for a set time, it means for some reason he's in a hurry to leave wherever he was before. 

When that place is _home_ , Natalia doesn't actually have to work to decipher what that means. 

Steve sees her and raises one hand in acknowledgement before getting in line. He also stops to chat with Sheena at the counter, because apparently her switch to the black apron instead of the green one is relatively new and he hasn't had the chance to talk to her about it yet. 

She seems pretty happy about it, and pretty happy to have Steve's undivided attention for her explanation of how she got it and what she had to do, with only the slightest hint of wry self-awareness that it's Uncool to be quite so pleased and proud about a corporate qualification. 

Which Steve waves away with genuine enthusiasm. 

So as far as it goes, it's a pretty cleverly innocuous way of putting off actually coming over to sit down, and one that makes someone else a bit happier about their day - but that doesn't mean Natalia can't _see_ the avoidance, plain as a flashing sign over Steve's head. It's another not-particularly-great sign. 

He's wearing jeans and a blue canvas jacket she hasn't seen before over some kind of cotton shirt, but that doesn't give her any information one way or the other. That, from Steve, could be anything from a deliberate outfit of choice to throwing on whatever happened to be on the floor. It's much harder to read Steve by his clothing than it is to read James the same way. 

But eventually Steve does bring the vent-sized whipped-cream covered concoction Sheena makes for him over to sit down, and to avoid beating around the bush at all, Natalia says, "You look like shit," in a conversational tone. And in Russian. 

It isn't going to give the kind of privacy that would mean anything by the standards of real opsec, but this neighbourhood is likely to be a bit thin on the casual fluent speakers. There's a solid chance switching out of English will get Steve to relax a little, and do it without having to do a lot of dancing around first. 

It's not that she doesn't feel well - or at least, not that she feels notably unwell, or that she has any reason for it. But while she's been assessing him, Natalia's also been assessing herself, and she can feel where everything's metaphorically a little bit tight, where the inside of her head is a little bit brittle, and while it's obvious Steve needs a metaphorical hand, it's also a good idea for her to do it via the path of least resistance. 

Natalia awards herself a private point when Steve sighs, as he sits down, and says, "And here I thought I might be getting less transparent," the same way. 

"Maybe to other people," Natalia replies, quirking an eyebrow and Steve makes a face. 

Besides, he does in fact look like shit. Up close he has the pinched look he gets when he's stressed and the slight twist of tension in his jaw, along with the curse of anyone as pale as he is, in that his eyes start looking ever so slightly bruised if he gets tired enough. 

These days, when he probably _hasn't_ actually been punched repeatedly even in training just earlier that morning, that one stands out a little more. 

"Bad night?" she asks, a little more gently, and Steve sighs again, puts his drink down and scrubs his hands over his face. 

"Bad . . . I guess three, now," he says, and his voice has a kind of sharp-edged ruefulness and another less identifiable note that actually stands some of the hairs on the back of Natalia's neck on end. It's something that's not quite uncertainty and not quite anxiety, but is definitely cousin to both of them. 

And along with the sharp edges and the tired it implies that it's the kind of day where he'd usually just have asked if they could meet some other day, except that he's not sure what he should be doing, either, and whether he's conscious of it or not he desperately wants another perspective. 

Natalia suspects he's almost not conscious of it. Or wasn't, until she was that blunt to start with, and now he's trying to figure out what to do. Usually, too, if something's screwed things up for _days_ he'd've at least been bugging Sam, and Sam would be tossing a question or two in her direction. But until this morning, she hasn't heard a word. 

Steve glances up, and Natalia gives him an eyebrows-raised, multi-blink look of patent query. He sighs, again, and seems to decide on a direct answer. Natalia's kind of grateful for that. 

"You know the movie _Spirited Away_?" he asks. "It's a Studio Ghibli one. The last one we hadn't seen, actually." 

He's been doling out Ghibli movies the way most people save good booze, Natalia knows, trying to make them last. And apparently managed to make them last all the way till now. It's cute - they're one of the things that most clearly bring out Steve as he must've been in his late teens, or his art-school days. How he was before the war and everything that came after. 

And while Natalia thinks most of what has come after's just managed to make Steve a better man and a better human being, there's definitely something _appealing_ about the short-term reversion to a much younger, simpler person. Appealing and endearing. 

Personally, Natalia's seen about half of the Ghibli films - the ones that most people've seen, the ones that got big releases and a lot of attention. Like this one, actually. But it's been years, and she has to think to remember what it was about. 

The thing is, though - 

"That's the one with the girl who accidentally walks into fairy-land or the spirit world or whatever you want to call it, isn't it?" she asks. "And her parents end up turned into pigs and she has to work at a bath-house to try and get them and herself out of the place." 

Steve's nodding a little, but Natalia can't quite think of what in that one has that would be so - 

"Wait," she interrupts herself, as memory throws up another spark. "Didn't one of the witches steal people's names to erase their memories and keep control over them?" 

"Yeah, didn't call that one from the summary on the box," Steve says, ruefully - but she can tell that's not it. Or at least not all of it. "And I should know better, and we do know better, and for a minute I thought that was going to be a problem but it wasn't. Not really." 

Natalia tilts her head. He's uncomfortable. One level is embarrassment, the simple embarrassment that comes from the fact that Steve thinks he should be able to handle anything, anywhere, and not have the kind of emotional weaknesses that you can't help picking up if you've survived what he's survived (what people like them survive) in the world. Or any weaknesses at all. 

That's only the surface, though. The embarrassment is a layer over an unease that runs very, very deep and is actually starting to give Natalia a small sense of alarm. One she hasn't had for months. 

"So what was the problem?" she asks, and Steve grimaces just slightly. 

" - come for a walk?" he asks. Natalia nods, and gets up to follow him. 

 

"Sorry," he says in English, outside, as she lets him pick a direction. "I don't think my Russian's quite up to that conversation, and it's not like anyone's gonna be listening in, I don't think, but - " 

"Sheena knows you," Natalia supplies, resting her hands in the pockets of her jeans as they walk, not particularly in a hurry, "and who knows who'd end up just eavesdropping out of people-watching interest if they sat close enough." 

"Yeah," Steve sighs. They walk in silence for a few seconds. 

The wind is cool and vast smudges of cloud drift across the sun, dimming the light for differing lengths of time. It's one of those days where you can't decide if it's mostly cloudy with a few breaks, or if it's sunny with a lot of partial cloud. Steve doesn't seem to have a route or a destination in mind, so they just walk, turning corners from time to time. 

Eventually Natalia prompts, gently, "So, what was the problem?" and then when he hesitates she adds, "The one you don't really want to talk about?" just to let him know that she sees him, and what he's doing. "Except you do," she _also_ adds, after there's another hitch, "or you'd've told me you don't want to talk about it already." 

"But would you listen?" he asks, teasing sour, and she smiles at him. 

"At this point probably not," she replies, acknowledging the point: if he's that torn, and then he tells her he doesn't want to talk about it, it's probably really important that he do so. There are definitely ways in which Steve Rogers absolutely does not depart from Standard Masculine Socialization, North American Model, and that's one of them. "So what is it, Steve?" 

He's really not comfortable with it: he ends up putting his hands in his jacket pockets and staring up at the clouds for a second before he actually answers. 

"The bad witch stole the name from a dragon," Steve says, in a carefully neutral kind of voice. "In the movie. Turned out he was the spirit of the river near the heroine's home - I think, maybe, or maybe she visited it, I can't remember. She lost her shoe and fell in and almost drowned, except she didn't because the river spirit pushed her out. And everything ends fine. She manages to . . . " 

He pauses and shrugs off the rest of the plot, says, "It's a fairy-tale, there's a final test, she passes, and then the river-spirit walks her out of the other-world, because he can't go home, because the river got filled in, or something. He takes her to the edge but he stops, says something about seeing her again, but she goes out through the way she came in and finds her parents and then when she turns around nothing looks the way it used to. It's all overgrown. Thing is, I think that's how her parents saw it at the start, because her dad was talking about old buildings, but to the heroine it looked all clean and fine - except at the end, now she sees all the overgrown." 

"A visual symbol of growing up," Natalia supplies. Steve nods. 

"I think so," he says. "I mean, the other possibility is they were in there long enough for all of that stuff to grow, but that seems like a pretty horrible way to end a movie that's clearly supposed to have a happy ending - people trying to explain months or years of disappearance, the legal trouble, all of that. So I don't think that's it." 

"But even if it's not, you still didn't like the ending," Natalia says. Steve shrugs again. 

"Don't know why," he says. She gives him a sidelong look. 

"Yeah you do," she says, lets the contradiction be flat. Because he does. Two years ago maybe he wouldn't've, but Steve's learned a _lot_ in the last two years and there's no way he's still that confused about what goes on inside his own head and why. Not after three days of brooding on it. So he can just give even trying that bullshit a hard miss. 

Natalia catches the edges to that thought and reins herself in a little. Because while it's true, Steve's still not Clint - and hopefully won't ever have to be - and not only is her roughness probably still not good for him, he probably doesn't deserve it either. 

Two years of progress or not, he is still learning. And under a lot of pressure. 

"Yeah okay," Steve admits. "It's just . . . stupid. The reasons. Like they don't even make sense. Like it's not even about that, it's the . . . inside of my head is the only thing that's about that, like even _I_ can see the way it's kind of cut-and-pasted on there and I feel like an idiot for how much I don't like it. How's that." 

"That one I'll believe," Natalia agrees. "Am I going to have to tease out and guess the inside of your head bits one by one, or can we skip to just you telling me? I mean I'm up for either," she notes, "just let me know." 

Steve gives _her_ a sidelong look and then says, dryly, "You sound _exactly_ like Barton right now." 

It's a point to him: it takes her aback, and catches her out, enough for a split second of complete blankness before she decides to go with laughing and straight up awarding him that point he just scored. "Okay, ouch," she says. Because she knows exactly what he means. In fact she's physically kicked Clint off a bed at least once for doing the same thing. 

That gets her a half-smile, or the ghost of an attempt at a half-smile anyway. Steve shakes his head. "It's not _ouch_ ," he says. "He's pretty much always got a good reason for pulling it, too." 

"I'm surprised you've given him so much opportunity that you know that," Natalia says, tilting her head. They stop at a light and Steve hits the button for the walk signal. 

"Unhappy?" Steve asks, which is a pretty unguarded question coming from Steve. He usually tries to use another six or seven questions to guess where things stand, to figure out on his own what someone's thinking of him when he really doesn't know - so he can decide how he feels about it before he has to acknowledge it. So he knows how to act. 

He's not very subtle or cunning about it, but he still tries. 

"Not at all," Natalia replies, and it's absolutely true. "It's good for him. The more often the same person lets him give advice or help them figure shit out in their life, the more he has to actually let himself connect and invest. Get attached, more than his gut impulse wants him too. I just didn't realize you two were spending that much time together, and that you've been asking for help. And impressed." 

Then she nudges, gently, "So now stop changing the subject." 

It takes a few more seconds of walking, and of Steve's jaw getting very tight before he forces himself to loosen it, before he says, "Sen - Chihiro, I mean the protagonist - " 

He stops himself again. Starts over with, "There's a point where the dragon's stolen something from the other witch, and the other witch has it cursed so that anyone who stole it is going to die. The heroine manages to save the dragon because she selflessly gives up the thing that's her chance to get out of the fairy-world or whatever it is. And it breaks the . . . controlling spell, the thing the bad witch had over him."

Natalia just leaves that one alone, because there is no way Steve needs her to point out why _that_ might cause a bit of resonance. 

Steve goes on, "And then Sen - the heroine, her real name's Chihiro, Sen's what the witch calls her, she . . . remembers how they met, and who he is, but when she leaves she leaves him behind. And she can't go back. He says something about meeting again, but - " 

He stops. Shrugs one more time. 

After about a half block of silence, Natalia steers them to sit on the edge of a concrete planter out in front of a low-rise building, because it's kind of obvious Steve is tying in their physical movement to his verbal dodging. "So?" she prods. 

She thinks she might be able to see the shape of it, but she's not sure. And she also thinks it might be one of those things where actually being . . . part of the world, and part of the stories culture tells itself, might be a big deal. 

Natalia only ever had one story in her head, growing up, and it was barely that. But most people, when they live out in the mess that is human society, pick up hundreds. And there are a lot of stories that are just metaphors for growing up, maturing, growing old, and if you're used to looking for them, and if you're used to those metaphors _mattering_ , it changes the way you hear stories. 

There were a bunch of common stories, common narratives, that she'd had to work through understanding from the opposite direction because of that. She still thinks a lot of them are deeply fucked up, but that's like saying water is wet. Most of the stories cultures tell their kids without looking at them too hard are fucked up. 

"Like I said," Steve replies. "It's stupid." 

He already sounds defensive and sullen, so she holds herself down to saying, "Steve it doesn't matter what it is that kicks something over in our heads," making it stay pretty gentle and not the smack upside the head she kind of wants to give him and he doesn't need. "You know that. So own it." 

Steve leans his forearms on his thighs and picks at the cuticle of one thumbnail with the other for a minute, staring through them with the worry-line on his forehead carved in deep. The wind ruffles his hair when it blows. 

"He's only here because of me," he says, at last, and his voice is the kind of flat Steve uses when he's trying not to show how much he hates what he's saying. 

Natalia knows he means James. It's not like it could be anyone else. 

"He's in pain all the time," Steve goes on, "and I mean not just in his head, I mean physical pain, and _then_ the other stuff, and everything is hard, and everything is miserable and I keep . . .thinking, wondering, if the only reason he's bothering to still be here, to still be . . . "

Steve takes a deep breath and it feels like he's having to really work to make himself be this explicit, like he often does with this stuff. "Still be alive, if he didn't know that if he weren't it'd . . . fuck me up. That it's just, he's been looking after me our entire goddamn lives and if he didn't have to anymore he could just stop . . . living in Hell. Maybe." 

The whole thing is like pulling someone's rotten teeth out; it's clear that all the words cost him, that the idea terrifies him, and that this is absolutely why _he's_ been sleeping like shit for the past three nights. 

And it might not be the kindest thing she's ever done, or the kindest way to frame the answer. But it is in fact _very close_ to genuine, to impulse, as close as Natalia ever gets, when she puts her face in her hands and makes a very low noise even she can't completely peg as exasperation, sympathy, disbelief (of the kind that isn't really disbelief because you know that whatever it is happens to be true, but it shouldn't), hysterical amusement, or some mixture of all four. 

If it _had_ been Clint she'd've gone the further step of actually getting off the planter and lying in the sidewalk like she'd just been struck down by the sheer absurdity of it all, but if Clint had said something like this, felt something like this without already knowing it was bullshit, he'd've deserved it. 

As it is, she sticks with putting her face in her hands and just waiting until Steve actually turns to look at her, a little aggravated, before answering the unspoken question. 

She turns her head a little, resting it on her hand to look at him, and says, in Russian, "You two deserve each other." 

The line between his brows goes a little deeper, although the aggravation in his eyes shifts to a fonder kind of annoyance. "You know when you say that I never quite know how I'm supposed to take it," he says, and Natalia snorts. 

"I'm never quite sure how I mean it," she retorts. "So good." 

She sits up, and sighs, and says in English, "Steve, I promise you that if James did not desperately want to be alive, and desperately want to _be here_ , more than anything else in the entire fucking possibility of creation, he would already be dead. In fact, someone would have found his body about three weeks after he pulled you out of the fucking river." 

Steve's giving her a look that says he wants to but doesn't quite believe her, so she adds, "He _definitely_ wouldn't have come back from the first time he left and you panicked and went to Tony." Because she still owes him for that. "Honest to fucking god. Even Tony knows that." 

That's not entirely fair, given how much that implies that Tony's a lot stupider about how other people work than he actually is, but it's probably compelling logic for Steve regardless. 

And frankly sometimes Tony might as _well_ be that stupid, because being smarter doesn't actually stop him from doing stupid things. But that's besides the point right now. 

"Tony's the one who told me he was going to come back," Steve objects. There's almost a hint of sullen there, but Natalia can't blame him. Not really. She does give him a patient look though. 

"Steve," she says, and there's _definitely_ a bit of sullen in the look he gives her. She shakes her head and folds her arms. "Tony knew damn well," she informs him, "that there were two possibilities. He was even _right_ about them, even if I'm still not convinced that's not a case of dumb luck on his part. One was what he told you, and the other was that actually James had gone so badly off kilter he was going to find some hole to hide and die in - and more _importantly_ ," she says, over what sort of looks like Steve might be considering interrupting her, "he knew that telling you the second one was absolutely fucking pointless. That you wouldn't want to hear it, it wouldn't do you any _good_ , and it'd get in the way of any good he could do. So for once he _actually_ managed discretion, even if I can't believe he didn't sprain something." 

Okay, that's not fair either, but it _is_ clearly persuasive logic for Steve in the here and now, because he's looking down over his own folded arms at this point the way he does when he knows he's being unreasonable and is trying to stop. 

So she lets him. 

It's another few seconds before Steve, obviously having stopped himself from saying a bunch of other things, does say, "I'm sorry, by the way. About not telling you. At the time. Or anyone else. I just . . . didn't see any way it could end well. Or help." 

. . . and then are times when Steve is just so . . . Steve, you want to smack him, even though nothing about him or what he's doing actually deserved it. 

"Steve," Natalia says, patiently, "I assumed you were going to be lying. I expected you to lie a lot more than you did, actually. By omission or flat out. You had every reason to and from your position you had no real reason not to." 

"I tried not to," Steve says, looking down and still picking at his cuticle a little. "I mean. Mostly." 

"I know," Natalia tells him. "I was actually pretty impressed." 

"Although I am aware you kinda bullied Sam into passing along anything I told him," he says, in such a blatant attempt to get _some_ kind of footing back in the conversation that Natalia has to step on the urge to laugh at him. It isn't even a mocking laughter it's just . . . very Steve. 

"Did Sam tell you or did you figure it out on your own?" she asks. Because she's not going to apologize, or defend that. There are times when the normal rules really don't apply, and that was absolutely one of them. 

Steve gets a crooked half-smile. 

"Bucky figured it out," he replies, and somehow Natalia isn't surprised. "Or . . . always knew, or whatever, and then actually gave me a look a lot like the one you just did when I was indignant about it." 

"Which look?" Natalia asks, because she's had several in the past five minutes or so. And she can think of at least three that James would have matches for. 

"The one that says you still can't figure out how I'm not dead yet," Steve replies, wryly. 

"Steve" Natalia says. "James has an entire collection of variations on that look. Actually, no, I take that back, he has a _repertoire_." 

" - yeah okay," Steve acknowledges, because how could he argue with it, "that's fair. But it's still the same kinda theme." 

They're quiet again for a while and Natalia realizes she's tired. It's not Steve's fault, or even mostly to do with him, other than he's just the . . . current recognizable shape of the world demonstrating it's full of nasty surprises and jagged edges to cut yourself on. Sometimes things catch her like that. She just wishes the world weren't set up that way. 

Steve breaks the silence by asking, "How do you know? You sound so fucking sure. How do you . . . " he trails off, like he's unsure of how to say it. 

"How do I know you're a lifeline he's desperately clinging to, not a chain holding him prisoner?" Natalia asks, being blunt about it now. There's a slight wince to go with the slight nod, but the nod is there. 

She shakes her head. "Because it would've been easy, Steve. Either time. The first time, he saved you - you were going to live, he didn't have anything else to do. If he watched you, and I'm pretty sure we can assume he was, it wouldn't take long to figure out that you were going to recover, that you had a home, that you had money, that nobody was going to risk coming after you. And after the second time, hell, he'd watched everything about how you lived. He knew. You were fine. You were safe, you had back-up, you were covered. There was nothing you needed from him." 

She waits until he looks at her and says, "Not that he could understand. Not then. You know that - you _know_ how little he could have grasped beyond that. The only reason he had to stay with you was making _his_ world better, Steve. Not yours." 

Steve looks at the pavement again. "He said he came back because he couldn't sleep anywhere else," he says, in a tone so neutral even it doesn't know if he's agreeing, arguing, or just saying. 

"You were the only thing in the world that even looked like it might be good," Natalia tells him, because she doesn't know either. "If he died, everything bad would stop but there wouldn't be a _you_ there. And that's the only thing he'd've had to think about. It would have taken _months_ before he could even understand the idea that you needed him, Steve. That you benefitted from him at all. Before he could grasp _how_ that could even be. And way longer before he'd be able to believe it. That is a lot of time with every single reason in the world to swallow a bullet, to walk into the river, to lie down in front of a train, or to just . . ." she opens one arm and then lets it drop. "Stop eating. Stop drinking. And let nature take its course."

After a second, Steve says, "You were afraid of him going off, if something happened to me," like he can't quite let go of the worry. He's not looking at her and it relieves a little of _her_ feelings, so Natalia lets herself roll her eyes slightly. 

"I was afraid he'd try and see if killing a few dozen people would make anything feel any better _before_ he realized it wouldn't and took the exit, sure," she replies, flatly. "And there were a lot of really soft targets around he could try it on. That's not the same thing as not knowing he'd've made damn sure that ended up with him dead." 

After another handful of seconds Steve exhales all of one big breath. It's the kind that isn't a sigh, but definitely comes with letting go of a lot of things you'd been holding onto, as if emptying your lungs could take the thoughts with out with the air. 

Natalia'll admit that's a little gratifying. Another breath, and she watches him try to shake some of the mood off. 

"See," he says, for the same reason, "I told you it was stupid." 

"Don't make me smack you," she says, and his mouth quirks a little. "The only reason it's stupid is because maybe two thirds of the reason you're worried is the little self-loathing worm gnawing away at the idea that thinking you're a good enough reason for someone to stay alive just because they like being around you is arrogant and prideful and you should be ashamed of it." 

Steve looks like he's about to protest that it _is_ and then looks like he's biting his tongue. Natalia gives him a knowing look and he sighs. "Do you ever get tired of being right?" he asks, rhetorically, a little bit sour again, and mostly teasing. 

"Yes," she replies, flatly and mostly not teasing at all. Steve blinks at her. She shakes her head. "So many of the things I'm right about have been awful, Steve, so yes, there are times I absolutely love being wrong." 

It's maybe a little more honesty than she entirely meant to load on him right now - he hasn't had a good three days, and she glances away from the opaque look he gives her. "Something about it threw James bad, too?" she asks, because she doesn't want to go down that line right now. It's not the time. 

Steve rubs the back of his neck and sighs. "Yeah," he says. "I mean, there's . . . a lot of options for what. But it wasn't, like . . .all at once. It almost didn't seem connected, except I know it is. It wasn't like how things normally go, just like something got planted in his head and grew really quick - almost like that fucking string mindmap, except it hasn't been as long. Or as bad." 

There's an unspoken _yet_ hanging in the air there that Natalia knows Steve doesn't like anymore than she does. But something occurs to her and she looks at him, pursing her lips thoughtfully. 

"This is the first time you've both been thrown at the same time, isn't it," she says. Steve blinks, frowns in thought for a second, and then nods. 

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I guess it probably is." 

"That probably hasn't helped," she points out, a bit gently again because it's kind of an ugly thing to wrestle with. "With each of you kind of looking for reassurance and getting anxiety signals back instead. That tends to just get into a kind of a spiral."

"Yeah," Steve says, this time with a kind of rueful resignation and the sense that if there were a wall nearby he might get up to bang his head on it. He gives her a sideways look and then adds, "And if you say anything about blaming myself I might actually . . . " he seems to look around for a threat that isn't really a threat, and settles on, "rub some of this planter dirt in your hair. Or something." 

"That was a stretch," Natalia tells him, solemnly. And she decides that's enough of this for now. "Is James at home?" 

She expects the answer she gets, which is _no_ : Steve's head shaking and him saying, "Not when I left. Doubt he's back yet, or for a few hours." 

"Good," Natalia says, standing up. When he looks at her in a kind of endearing bewilderment she says, "We're going art-shopping, Steve. Except you're not allowed to look at any of the price-tags." 

 

Natalia makes him buy several prints and a small original in oils, one that'll sit nicely on a small patch of wall in his kitchen that's been crying out for something of interest to fill the empty space. Then she makes him eat lunch, because she doesn't think there's any way in a million years or the depths of hell that James is going home before he's either exhausted himself or done himself serious injury and either way, that's going to be late afternoon. 

She's supposed to meet with Tony about testing on upgrades for her wristlet design but she sends him a text crying off: she's not worn out as such, but she's a bit more raw than she wants to be around Tony in a working frame of mind. 

Sometimes it's actually a bit harder for her to take then when he's trying to be an asshole. That's not his fault. It's just how she reacts to intensity, what it tells the back of her brain, even when that's not true about the man she's actually dealing with. So she'll spare herself the abrasion, and possibly spare Tony getting any of her mood in his face that he doesn't deserve. 

Instead, she finds Clint in the workshop-study-library he has on his floor, one of the only rooms not fully part of the open plan. He's sitting at one of the smaller tables, working on fletching a wood-and-stone arrow, suggesting _he's_ not having a great day either. 

He keeps in practice making those, he says, on the basis that it's one of the advantages of his favourite weapon: you can in fact make one with what you find to hand in, say, miles of trackless rainforest if you get dumped there. But only if your memory and your fingers still know how. That's about seventy-five percent of the reason he does it.

The other twenty-five percent is, it gives him something fiddly, involved and intricate to do with his hands on days when he needs it, and he can make the excuse that it's really for the other seventy-five percent. 

But the seventy-five percent _exists_ so Natalia usually gives it a free pass. Today isn't the exception. 

She just drops her coat over one of the other wooden chairs at a different table, and walks over to drop herself on the low leather couch and curl up. Clint has the radio playing - some talking something or other from the VRT in Belgium. It fades into a kind of soothing background noise: her Dutch is good, but not so good she can't just decide not to make the effort to understand it. 

Which is exactly what she does now. 

"That good, huh," Clint says. When she just gives a soft snort in response, he adds, "That's what you get for adopting Catholics." 

"Fuck you, Barton," she says, with absolutely no rancour. "I don't have to take that from someone who had an unofficial note in his file banning him from missions with vulnerable kids and old ladies." 

He doesn't answer that because there _is_ no answer for that. And she doesn't bother asking how he knew why she was hiding on his couch for a while. It'd be a waste of words.


	3. Chapter 3

There's still sun out, but not for much longer. 

The kitchen is a mess of broken glass and stoneware and spilled everything, with cabinet doors and drawers sometimes ripped off and sometimes splintered. When the thought actually takes shape in Bucky's head that at least he remembers doing all of it, he kicks out at a nearby intact one, splitting it down the middle, because why the fuck not. It's not like he can actually fucking make this worse. Not in any way that matters. It's all pieces and mess. 

Oh, and blood. As he looks at the floor he can see spatters of red, some of it mixing and thinning into the water or milk spilled here and there, and nothing that broke or spilled would do that: blood, not a lot, but enough to notice. His. He wonders what it's from. He can't really . . . _feel_ anything on his skin, anything that makes sense, it's all just . . . static, and noise, and nothing. Maybe the bright fire on the sole of his foot is a cut, or maybe it's just something misfiring; maybe he's got gravel in his skin under his shirt. He'll find out later. 

He doesn't actually give a fuck right now. 

He stays sitting where he is, back to a cupboard without its door, surrounded by the mess and staring at it and through it. Tries not to be here, without actually leaving. The shelves in the cupboard dig into his back and he can feel that, the pressure, and it should probably hurt too at least a little, but he can't find that either. He resists the impulse to toy with the tags on their chain around his neck. 

He rests his head in his hands, his hands on bent knees, and waits. 

After a while there's a small high-pitched _mew_ from the other side of his right leg. The stupid cat paws his hip three or four times; on the last one she extends claws just far enough to catch in his jeans, so he lets that leg straighten, fall, for her to climb onto and settle into a loaf. She stretches out her neck, nose pointed at the floor, and meows again until he rests his hand on her back. 

Then she starts to rattle with her purr. 

Fucking stupid thing. Fucking blind idiot baby. Except not. Not a baby anymore. Always a baby. But she's something, her fur is something her noise is _something_ \- 

He tried leaving. He tried burning it off, whatever "it" meant. What ever stupid piece of bullshit got shaken loose, by who knows fucking what about the stupid - 

He doesn't even know. He could know. Maybe. Take it all apart. But it's like trying to fucking untangle bullshit that keeps wrapping itself back up while you work and just - 

Then he tried coming home. None of them worked. Still not working. He can still hear _that bastard's_ voice, he can still smell the - it's still _there_ all of it's still there and he's sitting in the mess of another thing he's wrecked and if someone asked him what the fuck he thinks he's doing he wouldn't have an answer, wouldn't know what to say, because he doesn't fucking _know_. 

_What do you think you're doing?_

_What do you think you'll_ get? _Where does this fucking end you stupid piece of_ shit _and why do you think you should even fucking try? What is this worth? What fucking good does this do anyone?_

 _What fucking good have you_ ever _done anyone?_

And it's bitter and it's him, he's the one asking himself the fucking question and he doesn't have an answer. Doesn't fucking know what he thinks is ever going to happen, where this is going to end. Doesn't know what the fuck you could - doesn't know, when you get ripped apart, when you get carved up and remade, recast as a weapon, what in _God's name_ you could ever fucking hope to be. Where the fuck he thinks this is going to _end_. 

And then. 

And then it's the loop, then it's the fucking cycle, whether that's insane or any other thought is fucking stupid, wishful thinking, trying to carry a fucking umbrella in a hurricane. It doesn't help; it's just more noise. 

He doesn't even know how long he's been here but the stupid fucking animal on his leg is something. 

And there isn't going to be sun for much longer. 

 

Steve telegraphs everything, if you know what you're looking for. Listening for. Either. He doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, he paints his whole fucking self out into the look on his face, the set of his head, the pauses when he talks. 

The way he opens doors. 

This time it's like making too much noise with it would insult the silence, be fucking rude to the atmosphere. And Bucky _hates_ that there's part of him that cringes, _hates_ that his fucking throat closes and breathing gets hard, _hates_ that now he can't get up, not yet and it's enough, the humiliation is enough that he'd fucking hang himself if he could. 

Just to stop having to do this. Never have to do it again. 

He can hear Steve come to the kitchen door and the way looking up is impossible makes Bucky _sick_. Makes him pick up the cat and put her away from him, makes him have to close both hands tight so he doesn't do anything with the one to the other. 

Gets worse when Steve comes in, stepping over most of the mess and then using one foot to sweep away some glass and a broken plate so he can sit down on the ground. Coats his sock with shards. 

That might be where the blood is from, Bucky thinks distantly: there's glass everywhere, and he has bare feet. 

Steve just sits, leaning against a half-broken cupboard, legs kind of loosely folded, saying nothing. And if there's a worst part it's that all of this just comes from a fucking story; all of this is just because the wrong fucking fairy tale ended up on the TV. 

And if the silence doesn't stop, doesn't _end_ something's going to break and Bucky doesn't know what it is so he makes himself say, "I had something like two dozen fucking arguments with you, in my head," but he can't make himself move, or look up. Tries to swallow; it only kind of works. 

After a minute Steve says, "Win any?" and out of the corner of his eye Bucky can see him tilt his head a little, try to pretend this is fucking mundane, this is normal. 

"No," Bucky says. Makes himself go on with, "Even in my fucking head you're a stupid stubborn son of a bitch." And he can see Steve look down at his hands, pick at the side of one thumbnail. 

Eventually Steve says, "Good." 

The kitten apparently left, because she comes back in the same door as Steve, sniffs at his further foot and then doesn't so much mew as yowl at him before she comes over to Bucky's foot and then tries to climb his jeans leg up to his knee. He picks her off and puts her down beside him. 

When the pause stretches on too long Bucky ends up saying, "I broke the kitchen," which is so fucking stupid and inane he can _taste_ the bile in the back of his throat. 

Steve says, "S'just stuff, Bucky. It doesn't matter, it's just . . . stuff." 

And Bucky knew he was going to say that. Something like that. Fuck, he'd say it if Bucky broke _him_ \- again - and Bucky _knows_ that and he can't, he can't trust it, his body, fucking things in the dark inside his head mean he can't and at the end of that there's just more fucking . . . broken. And this is fucking stupid. This is insane. 

_What the fuck do you even think you're doing -_

When he says, "Steve, I don't know if I can do this," it's not hard, the sentence doesn't stick, it's like being sick with words, like he couldn't stop himself if he tried and what comes is a stinking, steaming pile in the end. The admission. Confession maybe. 

Again. 

It startles him when Steve touches his foot. No _start_ , no flinch, just - he doesn't expect Steve's fingers barely on the bridge of his left foot, Steve to lean forward to do that, and to wait until he'll at least pretend he can look up. Pretend he's not looking past Steve's fucking arm at broken wood instead. 

Steve says, "There's no _this_ , Buck," quiet, so fucking quiet, like he's fucking just barely saying them, like he's scared. "There's nothing you need to do." And Bucky knows the pauses, the hesitations you can barely hear - only if you're listening. 

And Steve says, "There's nothing more anyone could possibly ask from you. Sure as Hell nothing they could possibly have a right, and sure as . . .Christ, not me." 

And part of Bucky wants to shake him, fucking make him _stop_ it, shout _stop_ doing _that, stop throwing yourself on fucking grenades on hills you don't need to die on, just stop_ , like it would help, like Steve would maybe listen this time. 

But he won't, he _won't_ , he's still talking, says, "You have done more than _anyone_ could be expected to do," and Bucky knows what he means even if something ugly in the back of his mind throws its head back and laughs because _too fucking right he has_ , but he knows what Steve means and so he doesn't, but he can't keep from shaking his head, can't keep all of the choking laughter out. 

Tries to start, "Steve - " and doesn't get any further, doesn't, because Steve talks over him and it's kind of like a wave when it hits you and throws you and knocks all the air out of your lungs. 

Because Steve reaches over and touches his knee and talks over him and it's just - 

"Do you think I don't _know_ ," Steve demands, "how much of everything you've _ever_ done is for me?" 

Bucky doesn't remember lifting his head, doesn't, just, he's looking now, just he stares at Steve for a minute, Steve's eyes, Steve's frown, worry and its deep line carved in skin like it signed him. And then he can't. 

Can't look anymore. 

He looks away, at the mess, at the broken pieces and the broken wood and the dents in aluminum pretending to be steel and the splintered bits of plastic.

And Steve says, "Do you think I don't know you stayed on the Front for me? Did every . . . _stupid_ reckless thing for me, and all the other stuff - that you killed people, all of those times, you did all of that _for me_ , so I didn't have to? That you God damn well _threw them off_ for me, to save _my_ life, and then came back, and stayed, for me? Christ, that you rip yourself apart _constantly_ trying to make _my_ life easier when at least half the God damn reason yours is hard is because I live here and I get upset when you're a mess? Do you think I don't _know_ that?" 

And there isn't noise in his head anymore there's white and there's flat and there's _silence_ and Steve's voice and Steve's words hitting the silence hard, voice getting louder until he cuts it off, hauls it back. 

Until Steve says, "Because I do. I know that. And if you think I don't - " he stops, stumbles; it sounds like he swallows and his voice is clearer, more even when he says, "You're an idiot." 

Bucky closes his eyes, lets his head rest back against the edge of the cupboard and tries to breathe. And the silence in his head is flat and full of sharp edges he can't see, and he can't - 

He can't - 

He shakes his head, a little, looking up to keep from looking anywhere else and tries, "Steve - it's n - " 

"And if you don't think," Steve pushes on, "you're worth a Christ-forsaken Hell of a lot more to me that - six hundred million fucking kitchens," and he stops like he runs out of breath, or words, or both and finishes with, "you're a bigger idiot," like that's all he finds. "Because you are. And you don't . . ." Bucky looks down, almost unwilling, when Steve stops, watches him look across the room to God knows where, jaw tight until he says, "it doesn't matter if you think it's insane. It's true anyway. You're stuck with that." 

And there is nothing in his head. 

There is _nothing_ , he can't _think_ , can't shape, can't - there is nothing except the way his chest hurts and _God_ fucking _damn it, Steve_ and an ache that's going to rip him apart and fucking dizzying, stupefying relief. 

He doesn't even fucking know what _for_ , and Steve is an _idiot_ and breathing fucking hurts. 

After a minute, Steve's looking at his own hands and he starts, "I'm s - " 

And Bucky cuts him off with, "Don't you _fucking_ apologize to me," flat, before he can even think. Steve looks at him, searching instead of frowning and Bucky tries to swallow, to shake . . . _something_ off. "I'm serious," he says. "Don't you fucking dare." 

His stomach churns; he's dizzy for a second. Something wants him to take that back. But he doesn't. 

And maybe the skin around Steve's eyes and across his forehead relaxes. And maybe the corner of his mouth curves. 

He says, "You know you're bleeding?" and it takes a lot for Bucky to keep himself from dissolving into hysterical laughter. The endless kind. The kind that might kill you. 

"Yes," he says instead, "I fucking know I'm bleeding." 

The kitten circles around to his left arm and starts to climb his sleeve. 

"Can I do something about it?" Steve asks, and Christ fucking damn him, Mary, Mother of God he does make that shit into a fucking question. The kind of fucking question his mother and Bucky's mother and every single mother with any pretensions to education on the whole fucking neighbourhood would correct to _you mean 'may I'_ like that would make a _fucking_ bit of difference to how the rest of the world treated their _fucking_ kids when those kids showed up looking for a job. 

Or a loan. Or bail. 

Or anything. 

He could just sit here. Bucky knows that. Almost wants to do that. He _should_ tell Steve yes - no actually he should fucking get off his fucking ass and do something about it himself like he should have done fucking hours ago instead of sitting here in his own fucking mess and letting it bleed and clot like some kind of brain-dead animal but since he didn't do that and he can't fucking do that he should tell Steve _yes_. 

Should manage some fucking gratitude. 

What he manages to say is, "If you want," because he is actually shit incarnate. 

So Steve gets up, and Steve comes back with the fucking first-aid kit that looks like the kind of shit Sam Wilson used to jump out of a fucking helicopter with because this is the life Steve leads now, and Steve sits down and starts pulling shit out. 

Because Steve does this shit. 

It turns out there's a piece of glass stuck in the heel of Bucky's foot, and he has to make Steve stop and he has to move the stupid cat and pull that out himself, to keep this whole thing from turning into an even fucking stupider pantomime. 

And there's echoes of Monty all over that thought and that, that is the last thing Bucky needs right now but it's what he gets anyway - and all of it, stupid memory, fucking sense-memory and sight and everything else of this fucking British almost-aristocrat, who lived through the previous fucking war and couldn't remember how to fucking do anything else. With two kids he rarely saw because he was smart enough to fucking realize that watching him and his ex-wife rip each other to pieces was poisoning them and gave her a big house and most of his money to deal with the part where she'd get stuck with the stigma. And then went back to the army where he'd've belonged if only the fucking brass weren't so fucking stupid all the time. 

Who's dead, now. Whose _kids_ are mostly dead now, his grandkids old enough to have grandkids. 

Who only exists in a few people's memories and then in books and Bucky can't even tell what parts of his memories are real and what he might've made up as he tried to piece together something from the fucking mess. 

He pulls the glass out of his foot and drops it on the floor. 

Blood on glass never looks real. Always looks like paint or something. 

Steve cleans out the cut, does all the little wound-healing shit that he doesn't have to bother with because it doesn't really matter if some fucking bacteria decide to give a two-hour's go at reproducing because Bucky's body'll kill them off no matter what they are and what does it matter, if it takes a few hours longer to heal. It'll heal eventually no matter what anyone does. 

Another time there might be a problem. Another time it might matter that there ends up being an overlay, a layer over the fucking world in front of him, another time it might really fucking matter that behind what's probably reality, if he's lucky, there's another scene in Bucky's head where it's not glass, isn't just a laceration of the skin. 

Where the soles of his feet are burned in deep, deep strips, burned all the way through the skin, and where it isn't Steve fussing with so-fucking-careful fingers with a needle and sutures but a different voice snapping _get up_ and then the burning-ice-agony spreading out from his shoulder and down from his neck that's worse than the feeling of standing on the devastated skin of his feet so he tries- 

Another time, that might matter. 

Right now it's just more noise. 

"I never knew why you bothered, you know," Steve says, and it's like hitting a corner too fast - Bucky's thoughts, such as they are, scatter all over the fucking place, flung out in a fan and crashing into the walls. Into each other. 

He realizes he's been staring at the wall behind Steve's shoulder while Steve sits cross-legged beside him, head and shoulders bowed as he finishes what he's doing. As he presses a gauze pad over the sutures and starts carefully wrapping the bandage to make it stay. 

Now Bucky looks at Steve instead, who's watching him with an expression that's complicated. Full of things that feel too complicated for Bucky to even understand right now, except the earnestness. Fucking earnestness. 

Steve looks down. Makes some pretense at it being to change the wrap, but that's a lie. But he says, "From the first time you saved my neck I could never figure out why. Gave up questioning it eventually but never figured it out." 

And everything's gone . . . complicated. Everything's gone . . . something, layered, fractal, like the moment looking at a trick piece of fucking art when you realize the stupid fucking sepia picture of the Mona Lisa is made up of a hundred thousand tiny fucking pictures of the fucking Mona Lisa or you realize you're standing between six mirrors and it's not just that behind every fucking image is another image it's that behind every fucking image there's three and it's not just spreading out in endless repetition it's fucking exponential and the world turns into visual noise and you can't derive anything from it. 

And it's the kind of statement that's a question pretending it isn't. 

He doesn't really . . . decide to answer. The answer's just . . . there. And so is the question that isn't shaped like a question. 

So he says, "Because you're stupid, Steve," and he means that's why Steve could never figure out why, but that much is rote, habit, and he shakes his head and he says, "I was mad at everything. Everything was stupid, and wrong, and fucking awful." 

He's never said this. He knows that. He thinks there might be a reason but the question-not-question is sitting there and the answer is there and he just . . . says it. 

It feels like something is screaming at him to shut up, to stop talking _right now_ , to stop because . . . because of some reason? But it's far away. It's like listening to someone hammer on a glass door and yell while you're a floor down or the other side of the street, like in a horror movie where someone can't hear the other character, the one who knows better, screaming at them to stop. Don't go that way. Don't do it. Look behind you. 

He says, "And I was looking for a reason to hit someone and it started out that was good enough, and then I asked you what you thought you were fucking doing and you told me and - " 

He looks at his hands, skin and metal, silver and whatever the fuck you even called the real colours skin was, all its different ones on real people. "And you were so fucking stupid," he says, and knows the words don't mean what most people think they mean, "and brave and angry and you knew you were going to get your ass kicked six ways from fucking Sunday and you jumped in anyway because nobody else was doing anything and you were going to fucking get yourself killed. Not even a fucking joke, someone was going to fucking kill you, someday someone was going to hit you too fucking hard, you were gonna jump in on too many and they were gonna get too worked up and bounce your head off the fucking pavement and you were gonna die. Could've been that day." 

He doesn't see his hands. He sees the kids in the fucking alley and knows maybe both of them are just as stupid as each other.

"Wasn't, though," he says. "You were still alive. Weren't even hurt as bad as you could've been. We went and got soda." 

Not that he had money, but sometimes when Greg Pimm's mom ran the counter instead of him, you could charm her into giving over a soda without needing to pay. She was a soft touch for kids with big eyes who were polite. 

Maybe Steve's about to say something, maybe not; Bucky isn't looking at him. Can't. Just says, "And it was . . . better day than it started. Even though I got in trouble for the blood on my shirt. Same next day, when we went up to fucking Gordon Brewer's and threw rocks at the old windows." 

Steve says, "I remember," and it's quiet. The cat crawls back onto Bucky's leg and leans her face against his stomach and he tries to remember why he's saying this, what the question was. Remembers it's _why_. 

"And I thought maybe I could keep you from getting your stupid ass killed," he says, looking at the other kid in the alley and knowing he's just as stupid as the tiny one who tried to get himself beaten to death. Just as stupid and just as naive. "And if I could keep you alive until you fucking grew up maybe somehow the world would be better. Or just my world. Maybe I could do that." He shakes his head, because something's still screaming at him but it's still far away. "Stupid," he says, and he's not sure why. "But I thought I could, maybe. I wanted to try." 

The silence stretches long enough that when Steve says his name it's almost jarring, like he almost finished going somewhere else and the sounds, the syllables drag him back. He looks up from the cat he was staring through to Steve, Steve's face, Steve's eyes. 

"Buck," Steve says, soft and almost tentative. "You know you did that, right? That you could. You _did._ You did that." 

And it's like

all the glass shatters something goes

wrong it shatters all

all of it, and the screaming starts the 

screaming

that isn't, that isn't far away the screaming is - 

\- _right here_ and its full of all the pieces of glass and everything is shattered, and fuck, fuck no this has to stop, this has to stop _right fucking now_ or he's going to, he doesn't - 

"Stop," he says, and Steve isn't so he says the second one harsher, " _Stop talking_ , now," because Steve has to stop talking right now, Bucky knows he has to, and Bucky knows he needs to get up, he himself here needs to get the cat away from him and get up and he is and he needs to - 

Not be here. 

( _You did that._ ) 

Too many . . . pieces? Too sharp too many too many broken broken pieces all flying around, except inside his head, not . . . real, just inside him but it'll become real it'll _get out_ so he needs to get away from - 

"Bucky, wait - stop, Bucky - " 

\- here now - 

"Bucky - _please._ "

And it's Steve. It's still Steve. 

It's always Steve. 

By the bar-counter now, stopped in the space between counter end and wall. Bucky realizes his hand is on the patio door, left hand on the patio door (stupid cat on the counter, making unhappy sounds now) but he's stopped because - Steve. Words. Steve and words and break in Steve's voice. 

So Bucky stops. 

For a second they stand like that. A moment, a second, a million fucking years, for some kind of measure of time that has meaning they stand like that because everything got stuck. 

Bucky's skin feels too tight. Like something's hooked in it, under it, pulling at it. Like it's going to split and tear and everything's going to fall out but _everything_ isn't . . . human, isn't real, isn't the inside of bodies and blood and tissue and fucking nerves, everything is something else. 

He should go. He has to go. He should go. 

"Please don't," Steve says. "Bucky. Please don't leave right now." 

He should go. 

The man in front of him doesn't look like the fucking kid in the fucking alley anymore so much _shit_ between there and now but they're the same except the kid in the fucking alley would never ever ask him not to go. 

Would never _ask_. They don't ask. 

(When you ask someone might say _no_.) 

He should go. 

"I don't," Steve says, and stops, and swallows, takes a breath, "I'll stop, I won't say anything else, I just, I think it's a really bad idea, if you leave, I'm afr - " he stops again. Takes another breath. "I'm asking you. Please, Bucky, please - don't." 

His skin's going to split and his head aches and he doesn't know . . . what this is, except bad, Christ, this is bad, and he should leave and he doesn't want to now he doesn't want . . . this? now he doesn't - 

His head aches. The cat makes a noise. 

He broke the kitchen hours ago. 

_Please don't._

The kid in the alley never asked him not to go. 

Bucky lets his hand fall away from the door, and Steve starts breathing again, like he hadn't been before. And this is the wrong thing, this is selfish, this is - but he doesn't want to go, anyway? He just has to. He just. 

The wall's at his back now. And he's tired. And he's not going to go and he doesn't know what else to do so he sits down and rests his arms on his knees and his head on his right arm because he doesn't know what happens next. 

So he sits on the floor instead and waits. 

 

******

 

It has been a long time since Steve felt this lost. Or this stupid. 

Or this afraid. 

If he really wanted he could narrow it down to years, months, weeks, days, even hours, because he can in fact absolutely figure out exactly which day it was the last time he _knew_ that if Bucky left he wasn't going to come back and had to find a way to make him stop, but Steve has absolutely _no_ desire to fucking look that up. 

He just . . .knows it's been that long. 

Except then he at least knew, understood, _why_. So maybe it's longer than that: maybe he'd have to go back another year, to find a point where he didn't know why something would get the reaction it did. 

It's a few minutes that Steve just . . . stands where he is. He looks at the floor to make sure Bucky doesn't feel him staring, doesn't feel like there's something he needs to do or something wrong or . . . any of the things he needs not to. Steve has one hand leaning on the counter, the other resting on his hip just so it has somewhere to _go_ because somehow he feels more grounded if the palm of both hands is touching something. Like he's holding the pieces of the world together that way. 

The cat mews from the counter. After a minute Steve almost jumps out of his skin because suddenly her head is banging into his wrist and he stares at her for a second before taking the hint and petting her. 

She doesn't normally demand that kind of thing from him. Not . . . this emphatically. He wonders why she is now, as he scritches behind her ears and she rubs her whole body against his arm before she jumps down in one big leap and goes over to bang her face into Bucky's hip. 

But at least it breaks a little bit of the sense of being frozen. Reminds Steve that he can move. 

He cleans up. There's a lot to clean up. He puts all the stuff that's broken and small in the garbage can, and he sets it and the broken cabinet fronts and drawer fronts in the hall towards the door beside his shoes and he wipes up the mess. And the blood. 

Vacuums up the broken glass. Carefully. Makes a list of the stuff that needs to get replaced, and decides the dent in the fridge door doesn't really matter that much.

Steve does all of that, because it's there to do, and he knows how to do it. When it runs out, he almost stalls. He makes coffee because he doesn't know what else to do, and it's familiar, and because the only other thing his mind seems to want to lay out for him is the part where he really, really wishes his mom wasn't dead. 

He could email Sam. Or text him. Or get on the computer and figure out how using text on Skype works or he could even fucking . . . call, he could do that but he doesn't . . . want to do that. He doesn't want _that_ , he just - 

As he fills up the pot with water he shakes that off, because it doesn't go anywhere meaningful. Useful. While he's at it he might as well wish for some way to rewind time to before he said anything, to the moment it looked like things were winding down, getting better, before he had to get stupid and insecure and push stuff better left alone. 

Or three days, and not watch the stupid movie. Or - but once you started with that, where did you stop? 

It's not useful. 

When Steve glances over, Bucky's sitting with his legs loosely crossed and the cat in his lap, her chin and forepaw resting on his thigh and her eyes squeezed closed. She's purring, loud; it's probably what made Steve look, his subconscious noticing the rumbling sound of it even if he didn't think about it exactly. 

Bucky's petting her with his right hand, small movements. His left is resting against the front of his own stomach, relaxed or maybe a better word is dormant, because times like this it's kind of like Bucky forgets it's part of him and starts treating it like dead weight strapped on his side again. 

It's . . .not the best posture to sit in for a long time, even the normal, equalized weight of the prosthetic arm hangs awkwardly because of the way the muscles were cut and grafted, but Steve's . . . not gonna say fuck all. Not right now. 

Probably more important to leave the silly purring cat where she is. 

Instead Steve measures out the coffee into the pot and puts the pot on the burner. He goes and finds a his sketchbook and pencil-case and takes them to the dining room table. He finds his phone and a new - well, new to him - podcast by the couple that did the one about terrible food, a five minute thing about saints and gardening in a different universe, and puts that on. Sets it up to just keep playing the next ones, because there's something like six years of back episodes. 

While he does that, Steve notices he's supposed to have a meeting tomorrow. According to his calendar. 

He can't even remember what it's about right now and he kind of doesn't care and on top of that he looks at other things that are coming up and the idea of any one of them is overwhelming. He could probably handle an invasion or some kind of emergency that involves hitting things, but the idea of trying to handle normal life and normal people dealing with normal things right now feels like someone holding a blue whale over his head and telling him to catch it. 

Except worse. 

It's about five minutes struggle with himself - more or less enough time for the coffee to start boiling - before he gives up and just texts straight to the number that goes to JARVIS with, _hey JARVIS could you do me a big favour and just kind of clear out the rest of this week in my calendar?_

He asked this before, sort of, but usually only for a day or so, and usually it's because he has something he actually needs to _do_ , to be engaged in doing, that makes doing all the rescheduling himself genuinely awkward. That means _he_ can't email or call or text people and explain. 

Right now there's none of that. Nothing makes it awkward. 

It just feels impossible. 

_Of course,_ comes back from the number. And then also, _With that in mind, might I suggest ordering food to be delivered?_

Which is . . . actually a really smart idea, because Jesus, yes, it is well past that time and there's not a lot in the condo right now, so that's a really good idea and Steve says so. 

And also says, _Thanks, JARVIS._

After a second, a little bit to his surprise, JARVIS goes on to note, _I have currently suspended all events and involvement; if you alert me, when convenient, to what day you feel you wish things to resume, I will begin active rescheduling at that point._

_Thank you,_ Steve says again, and means it. _That's great._

He'd started doing this kind of thing only after JARVIS had actually offered. And he had - because Steve'd said something out loud while he'd gone to have coffee with Tony at the Tower, an apology or something, for just completely failing to show up when they'd arranged to meet a couple days before. 

JARVIS had volunteered that if Steve didn't mind him messing around in Steve's accounts, he was perfectly happy to take a quick note of "please cancel everything and notify whoever needs notifying" and make that happen. It wasn't, JARVIS had added dryly, as if Steve's schedule was complicated. 

Steve'd felt self-conscious and apologetic the first time he'd asked, but it honestly seemed like JARVIS . . . liked being able to help? Steve isn't a hundred percent sure how feelings apply to or work for JARVIS: it's yet to come up naturally, and it feels intrusive and almost ghoulish to ask, so he hasn't. But he gets a definite sense that JARVIS feels _satisfaction_ at being able and, well, trusted to manage these things for people. 

And it's really, really useful, so barring some actual reason he shouldn't, Steve figures he might as well. He just makes absolutely damn sure he says thank you, a lot. 

The motions of pouring coffee and adding sugar are also kind of helpful. He puts his own on the table beside his sketchbook, and carefully puts Bucky's on the floor beside his knee. Then Steve sits at the dining-room table and tries to make his mind focus on perspective and dimensions in a sketch of the balcony outside for a while, with mixed success. 

 

By the time the pizza gets there, Bucky's up for getting up off the floor and sitting at the table and eating some of it. It's mechanical, but it's calories, and right now Steve absolutely counts that as a win. 

By the time they're eating he thinks he might know what went wrong, too. Just not . . . what to do with it. 

Because Steve figures that if you start from the assumption you can't have done anything good in the world, maybe having evidence you can't argue with that you did is as stressful as if the whole thing was the other way around. That's a known thing, a known thing about how people work: that the stress in that stuff comes as much from having to reconstruct the entire way you think of yourself as it does from that way being bad. 

So it can happen when the way it would have to change is good, too. And maybe it actually hadn't God-damn well crossed Bucky's mind, yet, that if that is the reason he did things, if that's what he wanted, what he was trying to do, then he absolutely fucking succeeded already. 

Hadn't ever, ever fucking occurred to him that if that was the point, then he absolutely already won. 

It makes Steve think about what Tasha said, and turn it around in his head: the idea that Bucky could've seen that there wasn't anything he could give Steve, do for Steve except be himself and be here, and how that meant being here wasn't about looking after Steve. It was about something else. 

And it makes him think pretty hard about how hard it is for Bucky to accept that he gets to have things he wants, that he deserves . . . anything. Ever. That he could have earned anything, ever, except disgust. And how even Steve does have to pretty much admit he knows that Bucky may have given up arguing with the fact that Steve _does_ want him to be here, but that doesn't mean he thinks Steve _should_. 

Just that leaving . . . doesn't have the outcome he wants. 

And maybe Bucky can use the fact that Steve'd make himself miserable following Bucky across the globe if he left to make that part of him stop trying to make him go, but maybe that doesn't mean . . . anything else about the inside of his head. 

Steve's not sure where it leaves them, though. Other than a plaintive voice inside him, way younger than he needs to be, sing-song habits of prayer coming together with the present and asking _Mother Mary, full of grace, please tell me what the fuck I'm supposed to do now._

And since it doesn't seem like she's given him any miraculous intuition he's still stuck with figuring it out himself. 

He'd seen a thing on the internet the other day, a gif or maybe a macro because Steve's not clear on the difference, that said _I know God wouldn't send me anything He didn't think I could handle, but right now I really wish He had less faith in me._

And right now he really, really feels like that. 

It just kind of doesn't matter. 

He puts his plate in the sink and the empty pizza-box in the recycling in the hall cupboard. It's already past nine. He sort of stalls at the corner of the front porch and the hall until Bucky's standing there, cat on his shoulder, looking like he's stalled too and doesn't know what happens next. 

Steve hesitates, and then reaches over to pet the cat's ears; when Bucky doesn't flinch or pull away, Steve lets his hand fall to Bucky's shoulder and upper arm, just enough pressure to be an invitation for Bucky to take another step and a half forward so Steve can lean his forehead against his. 

"Come get ready for bed?" Steve asks, carefully, and after a second feels the faintest movement that's Bucky nodding his head.


	4. Chapter 4

He gets out of bed around two am. 

He hasn't slept yet. He lay on his side, turned away, and listened as Steve moved restlessly until he fell asleep. Felt both times Steve started to reach over to him and then stopped himself, turned over instead. Bucky can hear him breathe, and hear the drunk couple arguing outside, and hear traffic over on arterial streets, never empty even at this hour. 

His own heartbeat's one-sixty, still. It's funny (is it?), that Steve thinks he doesn't know, can't count his own pulse or time his own breathing and know how fucking far off normal they are. What it fucking means that's his heart-rate at rest. Thinks he doesn't - or maybe hopes he doesn't. 

Probably more justice in shaping it like that. Hopes there's one less thing Bucky's got in his own head, telling him how fucked up he is. 

Steve's like that. And he's wrong. 

Bucky gets out of bed around two, disturbing the cat and making her lift her head up, make her little trill-noise. He reaches over and pets her head, scratches under her chin and after a second she settles into grooming. She'll probably get up and come glue herself back to his ankle soon enough, but for now she's busy cleaning between her toes. 

Something's still off, something's not . . . right, in his head. Something bigger than he can handle. He can feel it, like something wrapped around his throat and he can't see the other end, or who's holding it, or when it's going to pull tight. 

He stands at the foot of the bed for a minute or maybe a few, watching Steve curled on his side with his sleep-frown and shallow breath. The light's flat, faint, light-pollution, painting the world in different shades of darkness, simplifying everything. Not sharp edges: the world in black and white isn't sharp edges. It's big fuzzy shapes with the edges all running together into darker grey so you can only see anything at all once it's big enough and you can't see where anything really ends, or starts. 

Steve's only got the blanket pulled up under his arm: Bucky can see the grey tank he's wearing. 

Bucky drags his hands over his face after a second and goes out to the kitchen. 

It's the same colourless world out here, eyes telling him grey where there should be copper, or dusty red, or blue. The light in the courtyard's out, so it's darker than normal. Less real. 

He ends up stopped in the arched doorway, reaching out with his right hand and then leaning his forehead against paint over drywall, and for a second it's cool against his skin. Across from him is a sink, and there's a fridge and a stove against this wall, a dishwasher beside the sink, granite for the counters, but in his head there's something else. 

There's a tenement kitchen with the bathtub in the corner, covered with a board to make a table. 

No. That's wrong. 

There's two tenement kitchens, always two, one scrubbed and clean and with flowers in a battered pewter vase on the improvised table and mis-matched cups and plates but all with flowers on, a yellow and white checked table-cloth on the table with stains here and there from food or drink, the raw ingredients of food in some of the cupboards; the other one empty of most things, no table-cloth, still clean, no flowers, less food, and no vase, because it lived on the dresser. 

Those are the two that live in his head. One where Steve and Steve's mom lived, and one where he and Steve lived. 

His mother's kitchen was newer, and all the dishes matched, and the tub lived hidden away in a closet in the other room, and they had a real table, and the table-cloth was bleached white and always, always ironed; Bucky knows that, but he can't see it. Either it got lost, the memory of image got lost, or he didn't care enough to reconstruct one, afterwards. 

He never really wanted to be there. 

Now the kitchen's nothing like that. No kitchen is, not in this city, not in this country. Things changed. 

He gets a glass of water, in this unreal kitchen in this unreal place, in his unreal life. 

( _You did that._ ) 

There's no moon outside. Too many clouds.

( _You know you did that._ ) 

The water splashes over his hand; he looks down and realizes his right hand's shaking, stares at it. Feels like it belongs to someone else. After a second he takes the glass of water with his left hand, which never shakes. Not that responsive to disorganized nerve impulses. By design. 

Bucky ends up putting the glass down on the dining-room table, nothing drunk from it. The bigger painting on the wall's all washed out, clean shades of impressionist autumn forest turned a hundred grainy shadows, wet ashes. He rubs his forehead, eyes closing. Digs a knuckle into his temple. 

He hears Steve get up. He can hear everything, but in the absence of silence the scrape of cloth against cloth and the quiet snap of air and fabric in the duvet is still louder than most things. Then there's the creaking, in the floor. Wood flexing and settling and moving against wood, because Steve can know it doesn't matter and he doesn't have to be silent because this is a home in a building where people live and people make little noises, are allowed to make little noises when they move through the spaces they live in, get to have spaces they live in and leave signs they were there, and it _doesn't matter_ , because that's just a thing people do. 

Fuck. He should have left here, hours ago, when he could. When for a few seconds clarity - it felt like clarity - punched through selfish inertia and told him to _go_. He won't now. He knows he won't. He doesn't want to. 

Steve says, "Bucky?" from the end of the hall, by the arched empty door, where Bucky stopped earlier. It's the voice he gets when he's not sure if he should be concerned or not, and doesn't want to sound like he is if he shouldn't, and Bucky almost starts laughing. Except it might be choking. 

He drags his right hand down his face instead, says, "Yeah, I'm here." Turns and adds, "Not sure I know what the fuck I'm doing here," and knows Steve knows he's not talking about the dining-room, or being awake. 

Steve comes into the living-room and stops with one hand sort of trailing over the top of the arm-chair. The stuffed bear's still on it, still sitting there; gets moved sometimes if someone needs to use the chair, but goes back, with its stupid tacky red heart and its stupid face and the white silk-screen lettering _Happy Anniversary_. 

Bucky's chest hurts. 

Steve takes a breath and folds his arms; he shrugs his shoulders and tries to look off-hand when he says, "We could go somewhere else," and he's not fucking talking about rooms in the condo either. 

Bucky shakes his head. He sits back, half-sits on the table and puts his hands over his face for a minute. He couldn't say why. Or why he wants to laugh, because there's nothing funny - nothing _not_ funny, but nothing funny either, and fuck, he's tired of being like this. 

He drops his left hand, pinches the bridge of his nose with his right hand and then drops it too and he feels . . . strange, and old, tired, when he says, "Don't do that, Steve. Don't just . . .fucking offer to upend your life like - " 

He means to say, _Like that_ , but Steve interrupts him, follows halfway through the word _like_ with his own, "Like you did?" 

It makes Bucky stop. He looks at Steve, standing where he is, feet apart and arms folded, trying to look settled and nonchalant when he's not. His gaze is steady when it meets Bucky's, steady and maybe defiant, a bit, and pretending like Hell he's not afraid. 

And his face is a different shape but his eyes are the same, and the look's no different from when he wore it when they were kids. 

Fuck, that was a long time ago. 

He wants to argue, but every line he runs in his head he already knows what Steve's going to say, mostly heard him say it at least once before, and his chest _aches_ and really, truthfully, he has no fucking idea what to do. No idea what to say, or what it means, or what to do, and most of the times in his life he's felt this way have had to do with Steve. 

In the end he says, "I didn't offer, Steve." Because that at least he can fall back on, because it's true. 

"No," Steve agrees, looking down and catching a little fluff of cat hair with one toe, dragging it over the hardwood floor to the side. "No, you just did it. S'a good thing, too," he adds, corner of his mouth turning up as he looks up. "I'd've said no."

He looks down again and says, "I'd say I'd've regretted that but I wouldn't've known any better, but Jesus Christ, Bucky, I'd've been . . . " he trails off, looks up, shakes his head, shrugs, looks down again, "lost, _less_ , I'd've . . . " he trails off again. Lets his arms drop. 

Bucky watches him. He's older, and some of the lines on his face are sadder. Bucky remembers leaving him, the night at the recruiting station, outside the fair. That, he remembers. Is pretty sure it's true. 

Remembers how fucking scared he'd been, of what might happen while he was gone, or if he never came back. What the fuck might happen. What Steve might do. What other people might do. How that'd go. 

And then he remembers the time he knew he _wouldn't_ be back, knew where he was going to die and soon and had to keep from thinking about it, had to close the door and everything behind that door would just fucking well be fine, because it was back home, it wasn't there with him, and everything back there would be okay. 

Then Steve's voice and a new face, and everything getting mixed up again. 

"Bucky," Steve says, quietly; Bucky meets his eyes and Steve swallows, looks away, takes a breath, licks his lips - 

Takes another breath and says, "Anything I am - _everything_ I am," he corrects himself, "right here, right now, is because of you. And you know it - Bucky you _know_ it's true," he says, when Bucky looks away from him to the painting on the wall. 

_Stop_. He should tell Steve that, again. He should make him stop. The same screaming from before feels like it's there but now it's not . . . on the other side of glass, _now_ it feels like something wound up winding down. Pathetic last shuddering bits of some mechanism that's dying and getting fainter and fainter. 

So he doesn't. Doesn't say anything. Stares at the painting's lie of grayscale instead. 

Steve swallows and goes on, "I don't know how much that means, or what that's worth, because sometimes I'm not sure what fucking actual good I've ever done and definitely not sure what good I do now, but there is _nothing_ that I am that I _could_ have been, without you. Because you saved my life or because you were there or because you picked up what I dropped, because you gave me a place to _live_ , Bucky - " 

Steve stops. Looks up, blinking fast. "I know how much worse my life could've been, Buck. If you weren't there. If you didn't . . . help, if you didn't fucking bully me into _letting_ you - maybe I didn't in 1939, but Christ eventually even I had to catch on. Could've been so much worse, and wasn't. Jesus," and it's sort of like a laugh, a pained laugh, a sound Bucky knows really well from the inside and doesn't want to hear coming from Steve, ever, "I even know you used to sneak oatmeal and sugar and stuff from your house into the back of the cupboards where you thought Mom wouldn't see." 

The painting's supposed to be of a forest, but right now Bucky can't find any kind of recognizable shapes. It's just . . .forms. Shades. 

"You weren't supposed to find out about that," he says, quiet, tired like a lead weight's on his chest over the twisting ache still there. Steve laughs, unevenly, ragged. Short. 

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I was never supposed to find out about anything you did for me. Honestly I'm not sure where you get off calling _me_ a martyr at this point." 

Bucky looks down at his hands and doesn't answer. Doesn't have an answer. 

"You were," Steve says softly, "you _are_ the best thing that's ever happened to me. If it weren't for you I wouldn't be here. And - I wouldn't've been there." 

That catches at Bucky's head, makes him look up, frowning, confused - "Where?" 

Steve shrugs, palms open. "Anywhere," he says. "Anywhen, any . . . _thing_ I've ever done that's important I couldn't've done if it weren't for you. And that's not even God-damned _interpretation_ , Bucky, that's historical God-damned fact. Nobody can change that, nobody can take that away or make it not true - not even you, and not even me. You're stuck with it. Okay maybe, maybe other people did some things, including me, but none of them would have mattered without the stuff you did. None of them would've been enough. Erskine wasn't fucking there to make sure I didn't die of fever or from the flu a hundred times or get beaten to death in an alley from a fight I started, Buck. And I couldn't've made it alone." 

And after a second Steve looks away, down; swallows again and says, "You did that. All of that. If that was the point then you did it. You won." 

Its like something's caught him, it's like - before his skin was going to split and something spill all the way out but now it's like his bones are going to crumble and dissolve and collapse in on themselves. 

(And he remembers the time he stole money out of his dad's pocket while he was sleeping and how his dad was sure he'd done it and thrashed him for it even though Bucky never admitted it because he'd hidden it in Sarah's pocketbook while she was sleeping, after he and Steve spent four hours looking at their baseball cards.) 

Steve's looking at him again. "And I'm here, now," he says, and it's like he's pretending his voice isn't rough. "And I'm okay. Mostly. I can handle most things. And the only thing that could fuck me up more than I can handle now is if I lost you again, and I think that might kill me. I know, I've said - " He shakes his head, blinking fast again, eyes bright in the half-light. 

"Don't leave," he says, "and don't hate me, and I can handle anything else." 

There's a weight on Bucky's chest, it feels like, one that makes it hard for him to breathe, just about impossible to speak. And still the rope around his neck and something else, pulling at him, maybe trying to pull him apart except the thing is, what fixes him, locks him there is that he can't - 

In his head, in his gut, in his skin, in his throat there is something beating at him, hooks digging in and pulling and trying to drag at him, screaming at him that it's wrong, that this is wrong, that he can't give in to this, except - 

\- except that if they're right then there is something wrong, something _wrong_ with the man he's looking at, the man standing in front of him, something broken something bad something . . . _wrong_ and he can't say, he can't, he, there isn't - 

He can't say that, _that's_ wrong, a lie, Steve is _stupid_ sometimes and _stubborn_ but there isn't, there's nothing - he can't. 

He can't, it doesn't, he can't - 

No. 

He can't listen to this but if he doesn't he has to say there's something wrong with who Steve is what Steve is he has to say none of that should be real, that it's bad and he can't, he can't do that. 

Can't do either. 

It feels like something tears. Like cloth, like skin and muscle tearing open, except inside his head and his chest and he can take a breath but it feels wrong, like it doesn't go in, like it gets stuck and he can say, "Steve - " but he doesn't know what comes after he doesn't . . . know how to move from here - 

And Steve says, "I know," which is a pretty fucking neat trick considering Bucky has no fucking idea about anything and Steve _looks_ like he's scared the ceiling's going to fall in, so that's pretty much a lie, Steve, you don't know fuck-all - 

\- and then Steve says, "Just - c'mere?" 

And, "Please?" 

Bucky doesn't really . . . remember standing up, or the steps - he's there, now? 

Steve reaches out to touch his arm, above the elbow - touches, hesitates, and there's nothing wrong with him, with Steve, so Bucky takes his arm to pull him close and Steve wraps his arms tight around Bucky's torso and buries his face in Bucky's shoulder. Bucky rests his right hand on the back of Steve's head. He wraps his left arm around Steve's shoulder. And he can breathe, maybe, sort of, breathe in how Steve's skin smells, his hair, the . . .

Right things. 

Steve's hand works up to his shoulder and holds on and something inside of Bucky's head is laughing or screaming or - both? Both. 

And there's something in his head trying to get up, like something dying trying to crawl to its feet again except it can't it keeps . . .slipping. 

When Steve's weight shifts there's a pull, the tug of the cheap metal chain Bucky'd forgotten lives around his neck now. Reminds him of it. Of the flat pieces and the words punched in and - things. A lot of things. The shapes of a lot of things. 

He can breathe. A little. 

There's a cat, rubbing against his leg and complaining. A cat. The cat. Steve lets go, a little, pulls back enough to look down. Says, "I think she wants us to go back to bed." 

 

Something stops him, in the doorway. 

Steve says, "Bucky?" and this time he's no good at keeping fear out of his voice and Bucky shakes his head, because it's full of . . . something. Not even memory, something that drags memory with it. 

He says, "I stood in this doorway. Every night. For - months, and I didn't know why," he looks up, at Steve and Steve's wide worried eyes, "I had no fucking idea why and it's not like I could fucking sleep anyway but I couldn't - rest," he stops, makes himself breathe, "I couldn't stop, until I knew you were breathing okay." 

He's been pretending Steve's eyes weren't red, since the living-room, since Steve looked at the cat and decided it was time to pretend everything's okay and come back to bed, and that's not . . . wrong, there's nothing wrong, it's just Steve's eyes are red and it's - 

Crying. It's like a thousand miles away there's part of him calm and thinking and it knows what his body's trying to do is _cry_ , except it can't, it forgot how, it got broken - it didn't work, didn't _help_ , over and over it didn't work and it didn't help and worse and something just . . . turned it off. Broke it. Can't, anymore. 

Like realizing lets him breathe, like the thought matters, he can breathe but it's too fast, it's like laughing except not and nothing's funny, not even when he stops Steve going to say something else and just says, "At least I don't have to do that anymore," like it's - 

Laughing, it's like laughing except it should be crying and what you're trying to think of, says the part of him, is _hysterics_ , it's fucking _hysterics_ because we're a fucking _mess_ just shut up, just breathe and fucking shut up and go to _bed_. 

Like that's ever worked. He gets a grip, maybe. Maybe because he reached over to touch Steve's face, the side of it, check if anything really was real. 

The kiss is maybe the same thing, find one fucking thing in the world, one feeling and make everything else stop. One hand behind Steve's head and Steve's hands cradling his, fingers in his hair, desperate kissing back until they're both breathing like they're surfacing from way too fucking deep. 

(Makes your body scream, agonizing, twists you up, fucks you up and you still claw after it to keep from drowning. Almost fucking funny. Almost.) 

Bucky rests his forehead against Steve's, lets his hand slide down Steve's neck to rest on his shoulder. 

"Come back to bed," Steve says, his voice uneven, "with me, come back to sleep. Please." 

And Bucky wants to say something smart, sour, wry something bitter but he can't. All gets stuck. So he just nods, as Steve stands back. 

Steve kisses Bucky's forehead, drops his hand to Bucky's left arm to gently tug him towards bed, onto it. 

When Bucky rolls onto his back and catches _Steve's_ arm, Steve frowns at him, starts to say, "You know you never - " 

Except Bucky cuts him off with, "Steve, shut the fuck up and come here," and it's even and level because there's no room for more screaming in his head than he's already had so he doesn't fucking care what he is and isn't allowed to say, because when you've thrown yourself off a cliff it doesn't fucking matter if a bullet hits you before you hit the ground, you're dead anyway. 

Steve hesitates and then lets Bucky pull him close, settles his head above Bucky's right shoulder and his body half over Bucky's, arm curled around his ribs and leg over his. Steve pulls the duvet over both of them. 

And he wants this, Bucky wants this, Steve's weight on him, covering him, wants this more than sleep, doesn't fucking care about sleep he'll doze, like this, and his arm might fall asleep and he doesn't care about that either, fuck all of it, to Hell with it. 

Steve pushes his hair back off his face, strokes the side of his jaw and down his throat. His hand is warm, and the cat is settling by the other side of him. 

"I missed you," Steve says, quietly. Bucky feels his throat get twisted up, the words choking and then Steve kisses his temple and says, "Don't, shh, it's fine. Everything's fine." 

Steve's warm, body's warm against Bucky's, and he might not sleep but he can close his eyes. Listen to the cat purr, and Steve breathe.

******

It's just barely getting light when Steve wakes up again. He has the faint headache he's learned to associate with the emotional hangover, and the hollowed-out feeling, but it's not as bad as it could be. 

Not as bad as it _should_ be, probably. 

He's not where he fell asleep - he's on his front lying on the mattress, and he can't've been there very long because Bucky's not touching him, not right now, and there's no way in Hell he slept long after he stopped. 

Bucky's lying on his side, right arm curled under his head. He's watching Steve, but it's different. A little. Maybe.

There's still all the bewilderment there, and the faint overtones of frustration, where he feels like he should be able to get a handle on whatever it is that's confusing him, whatever he's working over in his head, but he still can't quite. 

But there's no real wariness in it. There's no fear. Not even so much the kind that Bucky's stamping on and pretending he doesn't feel. It's just . . .not there. Steve can't quite say that there's comfort or security there in its place, not quite, but - even just an absence of fear. 

That's a lot. 

Sometimes the sheer extent of everything, everything Bucky is and managed to do, and survive, and be, hits Steve all at once and knocks him breathless, kind of like walking in a dream when the ground in front of you suddenly disappears and you pitch forward into space. Like it knocks that all away and he's just left with the knowledge. 

And knowing what it costs, and what it takes, and how much of it Bucky did and does for him. Because of him. And for him. Like a wave crashing into you when you're not expecting it and knocking you down, dragging your feet out from under you, except in a good way. Sort of. 

Now's one of those times. 

It's also one of those times that the kitten launches herself from one side of Bucky to the other, landing right in the middle of them and protesting loudly. Who knows what she's protesting, exactly - but she is. It's probably somewhere around six. 

They're probably late waking up. She's probably hungry. 

Bucky's eyes focus on her for a second, and focus into exasperation; he reaches over and picks her up, putting her down by his stomach and then gently pushing her over onto her side. She attacks his hand for a second or two and then starts to vigorously groom her shoulder. "Spoiled little princess," Bucky mutters, and Steve feels himself smiling automatically. 

Then Bucky looks at him again, meeting Steve's eyes for a second, searching his face. And he says, "You're okay." 

It's not a question. It's just the kind of statement that's still asking for an echo, or a denial. Steve reaches over to push Bucky's hair back behind his ear and then leaves his hand there, cradling Bucky's head, thumb resting just in front of his ear. 

"God yeah," he says. "Yes. Jesus Christ, Buck, I'm so much more than okay." 

Bucky looks at him, watches his face, and it's still like he's reading something there but now it's . . . maybe like he's just being careful, and less like he can't believe what's there. What Steve is utterly God-damned sure is always there. Can't not be there. 

And Bucky says, "Okay," and carefully scoops up the cat and puts her down on the other side of him. Steve lets himself roll onto his back as Bucky moves closer, leaning over him and leaning down to kiss him and God, _Christ_ , he is so much more than okay. 

 

By the time they get up and actually put the morning wet food in Abrikoska's bowl, she's really, really annoyed with both of them.


End file.
